Microsoft 'missed a generation' on the mobile side, but chief executive Steve Ballmer insists that the company's upcoming Windows Phone 7 will 'give you a set of Windows-based devices which people will be proud to carry'

Steve Ballmer has admitted that Microsoft "missed a generation" on the mobile side but insisted that the company's upcoming Windows Phone 7 - which has garnered "really quite nice reviews" - "give you a set of Windows-based devices which people will be proud to carry at home, and which will really fit and support the kinds of scenarios that enterprise IT is trying to make happen with the phone form factor."

In his speech to the company's Worldwide Partner Conference, which brings together companies that sell, develop and use Microsoft products, Ballmer, head of the company for the past 10 years, said that slates devices and mobiles are "certainly an area where, how do I say it, we feel all of the energy and vigor and push that we have ever felt to innovate, to drive hard, to compete."

But without naming any of the rivals who have overtaken Microsoft's mobile sales - such as the iPhone, launched in 2007, which Ballmer initially dismissed, or Android, the Linux-based mobile platform from Google which now outsells both Windows Mobile (soon to be superseded by the incompatible Windows Phone) and Apple's iPhone - Ballmer insisted that Microsoft is focussed on getting the IT functions within organisations to offer Microsoft solutions to staff: "So, I encourage you, and certainly we're going to reach out vigorously to work together with you, and to drive enterprise IT, as well as the consumer, the people who work for the businesses we serve, they've got to come into IT and say, I want a Windows 7 slate. I want a Windows Phone 7. And we're absolutely hell-bent and determined to drive that volume with IT as well as with the end consumer."

Ballmer made no mention of the abrupt cancellation last month of the KIN social networking phones, which were meant to be the result of its billion-dollar acquisition of the Danger mobile company.

Now the company has unveiled a number of services to go with Windows Phone - whose release date is still not set. Windows Phone Live, a companion online service, was announced today. Pitched in the same territory as Apple's paid-for MobileMe, used for over-the-air synchronisation of iPhone contacts and calendars, it is intended to provide remote synchronisation, remote wipe, and a central location for pictures, contacts, calendar and notes within 25GB of storage. But unlike MobileMe, Microsoft will provide the service free to all Windows Phone customers - apparently for the duration of the phone contract.

Beta versions of the Windows Phone development tools were made available: the new API is nearly feature-complete, with updated push notifications and accelerometer interfaces. The Community Technology Preview back in March allowed for feedback from the development community and Microsoft have said it has been "blown away by the early apps". Pre-productions devices will be shipped later this month to selected developers, as well as deployment and testing labs in major cities. And earlier this week a group of Polish students were the first non-developers to get pre-production Windows Phone devices.

Appreciating that having applications ready for the launch of the devices later this year is essential to success, Microsoft is running a virtual live class for interested developers in the platform.

There are rumours that HTC - which used to be the biggest licensee of Windows Mobile, but has recently turned towards Android - will launch the first Windows Phone 7 handset in the UK, to be called the HTC Gold, though there is no confirmation from mobile networks or from HTC. There are also

"leaks" claiming there will be models called the HTC Mondrian and Mozart, also running Windows Phone 7 on 800 x 480 screens without a QWERTY keyboard, with Internet Explorer Mobile 7.

Can anyone explain why Labour's deputy leader shadow Cabinet Office/Olympics minister now appears on Google Maps? (Updated)

No, your eyes do not deceive you: Google Maps appears to think that Tessa Jowell is a landmark in the same way as Big Ben.

You can do it too: put the postcode SW1A 0PW into Google Maps (here's the link) and scroll in a bit. Pop! There's Ms Jowell.

No, we don't know how she got there, and the person who pointed this out to us promises he didn't. "I'm not aware that she's been mounted on a plinth or any such thing - any idea what's going on?" he asked.

We don't know either, though our call to Google is going through...

Interestingly she doesn't appear on Bing's Maps, using the fabulously authoritative and free Ordnance Survey maps. Make of that what you will.

Update: Google tells us: "the reason for this is that the information and listings contained in Google Maps are provided by a third party and this is included in that database." However, it doesn't know who.

Although we managed to find this entry in the Thomson Local Database. Could that be it?

Thanks too to DoctorFegg for the link to the Google Maps Fail blog. Ideal for passing the time while you wait for the tube to arrive at Jowell Squa.. Westminster. Thanks too to everyone who pointed out my foolish error in calling her the Labour deputy leader. That's next October, of course. (As in my favourite apocryphal Peter Mandelson joke, in which he's on the phone to a journalist who is being 'difficult' about suppressing a story: "So sorry to hear about the broken leg," Mandelson says. Journalist: "I haven't broken my leg." Mandelson: "Oh, of course, that's next week, isn't it.")

A web designer-cum-wood pellet distributor who says a previous contract entitles him to 84% of the company - and Facebook can't get more venture funding until the case is settled. By Jemima Kiss

Facebook is in court to defend yet another claim to ownership, this time from a web designer cum wood pellet distributor who says a previous contract entitles him to 84% of the company.

Filed in the Supreme Court in New York's Allegany County last month, the lawsuit details how Paul Ceglia signed a contract with Facebook in April 2003 to design and develop the website TheFacebook.com for an agreed $1,000 ( 665) fee and a 50% stake in the site.

The contract stipulated, Ceglia claims, a further 1% stake for each day until the site was finished on 4 February 2004. Facebook is valued at an estimated $6.5bn, so an 84% share would be worth around $5.46bn.

Following Ceglia's lawsuit, acting New York Supreme Court justice Thomas Brown issued a temporary restraining order that blocks Facebook from transfering assets. That means that the company cannot raise any more venture capital by selling shares until that order is lifted. The case has now transferred to a federal court and Facebook is trying to have it annulled.

Facebook dimissed the case as "frivolous" and "outlandish", said it will fight it vigorously and pointed out that a lawsuit over a contract broken in 2003 is "almost certainly barred" by the statute of limitation.

There are a number of reasons that success for Ceglia sounds unlikely not least waiting until the site reaches 500 million global users before bringing his case, waiting until the outcome of the (successful) Winklevoss claim and the rather bizarre sidenote that a restraining order was granted against him in 2009 by an attorney who alleged Ceglia had defrauded customers of his wood-pellet fuel business to the tune of $200,000.

But imagine, for a minute, that Ceglia succeeded, and moved in to take 84% of Facebook. We might have a new entrant in the MediaGuardian 100...

Blogging is not on the way out it's just that other social media have taken over many of its functions

A report last month in the Economist tells us that "blogging is dying" as more and more bloggers abandon the form for its cousins: the tweet, the Facebook Wall, the Digg.

Do a search-and-replace on "blog" and you could rewrite the coverage as evidence of the death of television, novels, short stories, poetry, live theatre, musicals, or any of the hundreds of the other media that went from breathless ascendancy to merely another tile in the mosaic.

Of course, none of those media are dead, and neither is blogging. Instead, what's happened is that they've been succeeded by new forms that share some of their characteristics, and these new forms have peeled away all the stories that suit them best.

When all we had was the stage, every performance was a play. When we got films, a great lot of these stories moved to the screen, where they'd always belonged (they'd been squeezed onto a stage because there was no alternative). When TV came along, those stories that were better suited to the small screen were peeled away from the cinema and relocated to the telly. When YouTube came along, it liberated all those stories that wanted to be 3-8 minutes long, not a 22-minute sitcom or a 48-minute drama. And so on.

What's left behind at each turn isn't less, but more: the stories we tell on the stage today are there not because they must be, but because they're better suited to the stage than they are to any other platform we know about. This is wonderful for all concerned the audience numbers might be smaller, but the form is much, much better.

When blogging was the easiest, most prominent way to produce short, informal, thinking-aloud pieces for the net, we all blogged. Now that we have Twitter, social media platforms and all the other tools that continue to emerge, many of us are finding that the material we used to save for our blogs has a better home somewhere else. And some of us are discovering that we weren't bloggers after all but blogging was good enough until something more suited to us came along.

I still blog 10-15 items a day, just as I've done for 10 years now on Boing Boing. But I also tweet and retweet 30-50 times a day. Almost all of that material is stuff that wouldn't be a good fit for the blog material I just wouldn't have published at all before Twitter came along. But a few of those tweets might have been stretched into a blogpost in years gone by, and now they can live as a short thought.

For me, the great attraction of all this is that preparing material for public consumption forces me to clarify it in my own mind. I don't really know it until I write it. Thus the more media I have at my disposal, the more ways there are for me to work out my own ideas.

Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling says: "The future composts the past." There's even a law to describe this, Riepl's Law which says "new, further developed types of media never replace the existing modes of media and their usage patterns. Instead, a convergence takes place in their field, leading to a different way and field of use for these older forms."

That was coined in 1913 by Wolfgang Riepl. It's as true now as it was then.

The original Force Unleashed was the fastest selling Star Wars game ever, shifting seven million copies. But can the sequel finally provide the deep Jedi combat experience that its predecessor promised?

The original Force Unleashed represented what a lot of gamers have always wanted from a Star Wars game a big, burly Jedi fest with megaton Force powers and a rip-roaring story of rage and betrayal. The first game to be based in the period between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, it centred on Starkiller, a young warrior recruited by Vader as a secret apprentice. When sent out to spy on the burgeoning rebel alliance, the brooding anti-hero gradually comes to sympathise with their viewpoint.

Although criticised in the gaming press for its one dimensional hack-n-slash gameplay, the mix of relentless third-person lightsaber battling with a twisting plot (which nicely explained the origins of the original Star Wars trilogy) brought in sales of 7m copies and a host of awards. A sequel was inevitable, but there was always going to be one problem: at the end of the original game, Starkiller is killed saving the rebel leaders. Though, of course, in the Star Wars universe, problems like this are never impossible to address

"When we started Force Unleashed 2, we kicked around some ideas," explains the game's executive producer and lead writer, Haden Blackman. "We considered starting with a new character or going to a different time period, or even doing some weird thing where we start from the 'evil' ending of Force Unleashed 1, which actually then became the basis for a couple of our DLC levels.

"But ultimately we kept saying that Starkiller was a character we'd invested a lot of time into. I enjoyed writing for that character, we enjoyed working with Sam Witwer, the actor who portrayed him, and we thought there was still room to tell stories with him. It wasn't a huge debate once we'd put the idea forward everyone got behind it."

So at the opening of the sequel, Vader seems to have a clone of Starkiller locked up in a holding cell on Kamino, the water planet from Attack of the Clones. When Starkiller escapes, his first thought apart from wondering whether he actually is a clone or not is to track down his love interest from the first game, Juno Eclipse, while rebel chief Rahm Kota wants to use him as a weapon against the Empire.

These contrasting missions see Starkiller travelling to Dagobah (where he apparently uncovers some uneasy truths about himself in the Dark Side Cave), and on to join a rebel fleet at the edge of the galaxy just as it's attacked by imperial bounty hunters. So, Starkiller just needs to locate Juno, save the rebellion and discover the truth about his own identity. "I was really happy with how the story turned out in Force Unleashed," says Blackman, "But it's a broad story in terms of the action focus. We don't get into the heads of characters very much apart from some new insight into Vader. I want to make this a much more personal story..."

This all sounds intriguing, but what Force Unleashed 2 really has to do is build some depth and substance into the button-mashing maelstrom that was its predecessor. Blackman claims this has been a key priority; the team has completely redesigned all the familiar Force powers from the first title including Force Push and Force Grip, and has added a few newcomers including the potentially amusing Force Mind Trick that'll allow you to trick Storm Troopers into leaping from high ledges. Each power is upgradeable, too, so with Mind Trick, you'll eventually be able to encourage enemy soldiers to start firing on each other. Plus, Starkiller can wield dual lightsabers now, which opens up some new combo possibilities. And looks cool.

More importantly, the design team has chosen to actually scale down the variety of enemies you'll face. In the original game there were around 100 different kinds, now there are 25, but each has its own unique abilities. As Blackman says: "We took a lot of time with TFU2 to really sit down and redesign our whole AI system, the way they navigate, but also to invent a whole host of new enemies, and make them tactically significant." He shows us two enemies to illustrate this new diversity. The carbonite trooper is large robot capable of freezing the player Han Solo-style, if they get too close so that's one to tackle from a distance. Conversely, there's the missile trooper, which resembles an enlarged power droid complete with an array of ranged homing projectiles; so this is one you need to get in close to and take out with a lightsaber.

Level design has changed this time, too. In the first title, many gamers admired the art direction, which recalled the grungy look of the original movies, but disliked the linearity. This time things are more open and interactive; Blackman describes the stages as "Force playgrounds", each one littered with objects that can be picked up and propelled around the environment to destructive effect. Players will be able to gain XP by using props in imaginative ways, and this in turn feeds Starkiller's Force Fury gauge, which gives a temporary mega-boost to his powers. It looks like there will also be special sequences which Blackman refers to as "run for your life moments", in which you'll have a set amount of time to leg it through an area while the whole place is systematically destroyed. Sounds a little like the end of the Crew Expendable mission in Modern Warfare, but we'll see how it goes.

At the heart of it all, the game engine has been upgraded, with an overhauled streaming system, as well as new lighting and physics. Like its predecessor, Force Unleashed 2 will combine three third-party physics engines, Havok, Euphoria and Digital Molecular Matter, to provide cutting edge human animation, materials effects and authentic physical forces. But this time round, the team feels it's getting the most out of its triple engine set-up, with enemies flailing and scenic structures collapsing as you blast them with Force powers. "The biggest difference is that the team knows how to use this stuff!" jokes Blackman. "Whenever you're building the first iteration [of a game series] and a brand new game engine at the same time, everything comes in hot and fast we were literally figuring out how to get the most out of those three technologies all the way up to shipping. The DLC then helped us to learn more, and that knowledge has given us the biggest leap forward."

As a writer though, it seems what Blackman is most excited about is the story behind Force Unleashed 2. During the pre-E3 hype for the game, he's been telling reporters "this is our Empire Strikes Back", which was always going to drum up interest. But what exactly is he getting at with this quotable soundbite? "Empire feels to me like a more personal story," he says. "They introduce the romance between Han and Leia in a really meaningful way, and it's a much darker story than A New Hope so there are some of those elements that we wanted to carry over.

"But we always looked to Empire Strikes Back as our guiding star - a lot of the art direction in Force Unleashed was based on Empire. But we really made a conscious effort to say, 'okay this is a sequel, how do we take some of the same steps forward that Empire did in terms of tone and character development?' And to me, Empire may be the best movie of all time, so to set that as a goal was good for motivating the team!"

Like the first game, too, Force Unleashed 2 will create direct parallels with the movie saga. The original talked about the formation of the rebellion, but the sequel will move things on and explain other factors of the era immediately before A New Hope. As Blackman hints: "There are moments fans will look at it and say, 'well I didn't know it happened that way '" He also mentions that several major characters from the movies will take significant roles in this game, though won't be drawn on who. I ask about the demo, which shows the rebel forces about to be attacked by mercenaries does this mean we can expect a certain favourite bounty hunter to appear? "You mean IG-88?" quips Blackman.

But it's not all going to be about thrilling hardcore fans with recognisable cameos. Blackman insists that he wants Force Unleashed II to interest those who haven't even seen the film saga. "We're trying to re-envision and reinvent Star Wars in some ways," he claims. "If you like the big OTT action games, I'm hoping you'll like this one, and that the Star Wars setting is just a bonus. At the end of the day, we're making a game not a movie. It's the gameplay that has to really grab you."

He also points out that there are both obsessive Star Wars fanatics and casual fans on the team, and that they have regularly looked outside of the series for inspiration: "We're constantly referencing other movies and games when we're trying to get a point across. We have a kind of short hand. If I say, 'I want his reaction to be like Roy Scheider in Jaws when he fist sees the shark' everybody knows what I'm talking about. There's a moment we touch on in the story this is one of my favourite moments when Starkiller has a vision of Juno and she passes right through him and fades away. And I wanted his reaction to be reminiscent of the moment in Poltergeist, where the mother of Carol Anne, the girl who's disappeared, feels her daughter pass through her. She closes her eyes and can smell her daughter around her. I wanted to get that same emotional punch."

So what can we really expect from Force Unleashed 2? Demo footage from E3 suggests a strong physics system, some outlandish powers and a range of interesting destructible environments. But can the game really move us away from button mashing and toward a more refined system, like Bayonetta or Yakuza 3? We'll need hands-on experience to gauge that.

What we do know is that, once again, there will be no multiplayer with the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. Blackman says he wanted to concentrate on the single-player story, but as Red Dead Redemption has recently shown, it's possible to have a very strong campaign-based game, but still make some room for a few offbeat online multiplayer activities. It seems that the Wii version will feature a four-player deathmatch, though, and there's talk of a "Challenge" mode in the other versions which will feature an online leaderboard perhaps little consolation to many gamers in this connected era.

But then, as the strongest element of the original game was its twisting cinematic narrative, there's still going to be plenty of interest in this clearly intricately planned and crafted sequel. Blackman has been working on Star Wars games for 13 years and seems as excited by this one as anything that's gone before. "I can't wait to see the reaction to the ending!" he says. " It ties directly into the saga, and to the character arcs of some of the main characters we know from the saga. I think we've made some bold, ballsy choices that are going to leave fans talking "

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II is released on DS, PC, PS3, Wii and Xbox 360 on 29 October

Public libraries have a vital role bridging the digital divide and teaching people how to get reliable information from the internet

With the government axing public services, librarians are being forced to defend their existence against accusations of irrelevance in modern society. As one adviser on Newsnight put it during the BBC's recent "mini-consultation" on the proposed cuts, why do we need libraries when everyone has broadband and can access information without recourse to a librarian?

There are a number of problems with this argument.

Firstly, as recent statistics from the Office for National Statistics demonstrate, not everyone has broadband access, let alone internet access. Statistics for 2009 show that 63% of the UK population have broadband, leaving more than a third who do not. Furthermore, more than 10 million adults in the UK have never used the internet. And, unsurprisingly, it is the poorest who are least likely to have an internet connection only 52% of those with no qualifications have access.

Public libraries provide a key role in both facilitating access to information via the internet, as well as providing free internet access to bridge the digital divide, which does not only exist between industrialised and developing nations. Taking away this important role would disenfranchise people further, and mean they would have to refer to a commercial provider. Given that they are likely to have very few available resources, how can anyone morally argue that there is no longer a need for libraries to provide free internet?

Secondly, there is the issue of IT literacy. There is a common belief that once everyone has broadband, all problems relating to access to information will be solved. But it is not enough. There are still many users who cannot search the internet correctly and successfully. Some simply select the top result in Google rather than ensuring that their search terms are appropriate, and that the resource is reliable. It is not just the general public even respected journalists seemingly fail to grasp the intricacies of search engines. Take, for example, this piece by Evelyn Gordon in which she claims that Amnesty International had made only one statement about the crisis in the Congo during 2009.

What appears to have happened is that she has used the search term congo amnesty international and clicked on the link Congo | Amnesty International, which does indeed produce one result for 2009. However, this refers to the Republic of Congo not the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is what the article itself was referring to (Amnesty actually made more than 20 statements on the DRC during 2009). A simple error has led to inaccurate information being imparted via a supposedly experienced journalist (which was then repeated by another journalist, Melanie Phillips).

Consider the implications this has in a democracy where the proliferation of misinformation is caused by poor IT literacy. And that is without even considering the issue of adult illiteracy, or the fact that it is not compulsory for new academies to include a library.

Librarians not only provide access to physical materials, they are also trained in using the internet appropriately to extract information for users a skill that has been at the heart of the profession for many years. This ensures that misinformation is minimised and helps to maintain a well-informed society. Furthermore, as information professionals, they play an important role in facilitating access to government information that is otherwise inaccessible to the disenfranchised. This is also crucial in a democracy, particularly during times of economic crisis. And yet, when they're needed most, libraries are talked of as an irrelevance by policymakers who think libraries should be run by untrained volunteers.

Statistics may show a decline in library goers (although these are not accurate reflections of how the service is utilised), but figures obtained from Cipfa demonstrate a 49% increase in the usage of library websites. Libraries are not declining in importance people are simply changing the way they use them. It does not then follow that we need to abandon libraries as they are now and shift everything online, which would be a disaster.

Libraries are a bridge between the information-rich and the information-poor. They need reinforcing, not dismantling. We need to continue to provide a highly skilled service that is able to meet the needs of the general public. The service ought to continue to innovate to take advantage of the way in which people are interacting with the service in a different way. It needs to continue to bridge the gap between those who have access to the internet and those who do not, while also ensuring it delivers on other aspects of its core service (book loans, local studies materials, etc). If the service is cut, we run the risk of an ill-informed society that is ill-equipped to prosper in the "information age" a dangerous prospect for any democracy.

This article was commissioned via the You tell us page. If you have your own suggestions for subjects you would like to see covered by Cif, please visit the page and tell us

Twitter is serving more than 800m search queries a day, according to Biz Stone. "That's over 24bn searches per month, more than Bing (4.1bn) and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) (9.4bn) combined," Fast Company chirps.

Big deal.

Comparing the search feature of Twitter with search engines like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is almost as irrelevant as the continual stories which gleefully report Twitter has more users than media outlets like The New York Times (NYSE: NYT). One's a network, the other's a news publisher - this is not comparing like with like.

In the same way, one can't group Twitter together with web search services and proclaim: "Twitter has taken the title." Sure, both such services have a search function, but each indexes a very different kind of material - one, rapid-fire conversations and news updates; the other, deeper, more static and longer-lasting information.

What's more, these numbers likely don't include automated searches conducted by bots and scripts rather than humans.

This doesn't mean Twitter has no value in search. If I want to find out what people are saying about the World Cup right now, I might search Twitter. And you can see how Promoted Tweets against search terms would mimic the contextual advertising relevance which Google's AdWords pioneered (say, showing a Nike ad to soccer searchers).

But if I want to find fixture lists, stadia capacity and previous tournament winners, I'm going to Google.

The value of advertising against real-time updates is nascent, and the challenge for all concerned appears to be uniting conversational search with informational search, providing the best of both worlds. In that, the incumbent web searchers with which FastCompany contrasts Twitter have an advantage, now comprising both Twitter and deeper search results

Conversely, Twitter can't necessarily say that it boasts search access to older, more static information, so it's on-site search credentials will remain constrained and the network may pose more value as provider, a part of a wider ecosystem.

As Evan Williams himself said last Tuesday (not quoted by FastCompany but the video is embedded below):

"You can search on Twitter, but I think the search has a long way to go... With Twitter, you have no history about a document. If freshness is a key component, they (Google and Microsoft) will surface tweets. They are just at the beginning stages of that and we are at the beginning stages of that. It's an unsolved problem. Even though we're working on it, having Google engineers figure out how to surface the best information to people is a good deal because it's not figured out."

Stone: "There's a big difference between searching the web - which is about I, me, I'm asking the search engine to give me something - and when you are on Twitter, you are open to information that's coming to you."

There's surely a tweet search opportunity a-brewing - but only if everyone brings a degree of granularity to the prospect and is prepared to recognize that not all 'search' engines are necessarily equal.

Here's the interview video from the Aspen Ideas Festival:

Twitter's Kevin Thau will be appearing at our next conference, paidContent Mobile: Leveraging the Smartphone Boom, July 20 in New York City. You can find out more about the agenda and register at http://paidcontent.org/event/mobile2010/

Digital publishing deals locking writers in for the duration of copyright risk damaging industry, says Society of Authors chair

The chair of the Society of Authors, Tom Holland, has hit out at publishers' attempt to seize control over electronic rights, calling ebook deals that lock authors in for the duration of copyright "not remotely fair".

Speaking at the Romantic Novelists' Association's annual conference last week, Holland urged authors to push for ebook royalties that are "considerably higher" than the standard of around 25%. Although Holland said the market for ebooks is only about 1% of the total UK market, it is "growing fast" and the Society of Authors believes that, given publishers will eventually have much lower warehousing and distribution costs for ebooks, royalties should be divided 50/50.

"Most publishers are insisting they should control ebook rights and this will be written into standard contracts. I think it's an entirely reasonable position to take, so long as the royalties and returns on ebooks are fair and proper and reasonable. If they are not, I suspect we may well find very big-name authors, such as JK Rowling or Dan Brown, will go their own way," said Holland. "It's a danger publishers need to recognise and a danger for writers as well. If JK Rowling controls her own ebook rights [then] there's less money for her publisher to invest in new authors. We could face a situation of very big-name authors pulling the ladder up after them [and] we have a stake in seeing a healthy publishing industry."

Although publishers "are inclined to dismiss the argument that costs are reduced on ebooks", Holland said: "Once a system has been set up, publishers won't be paying for warehousing, distribution and printing, and we have to ask ourselves what are they spending the money on?

"We accept that publishers have been investing heavily in digital infrastructure and at the moment they are losing money on ebooks because sales are so low. I can sort of understand their reservations over higher royalties at the moment, but nevertheless a contract that lasts for the duration of copyright is a hugely long time. Publishers in negotiations with Amazon, or whoever, say they want two-year contracts because there's such flux, but at the same time are asking authors for the duration of copyright. It has to be wrong it's not remotely fair," he said.

"Twenty-five per cent might be reasonable as the infrastructure's set up but only for two years. The risk if we don't do that is that the rate will essentially be set in concrete, it will freeze and be taken as the norm, not just for two to three years but for two to three decades. If we don't fight it now, we will lose our chance to present and make our case, and that will be it."

Katie Fforde, bestselling novelist and chair of the Romantic Novelists' Association, agreed that a 25% ebook royalty "would be perfectly fair if it was for two years, or a limited period, and then could be renegotiated". "We don't want to go on and on paying for the set-up costs," she said. "I think a 50/50 split is greedy, but if you don't ask you don't get, and I imagine that might raise the negotiations."

The Samuel Johnson prize-winning historian Antony Beevor believes the Society of Authors is "absolutely right". "To begin with, publishers were trying to set a royalty of a lot less than 25%, they were trying to get around 12.5-15%. Fortunately the agents have taken a pretty strong line and so has the Society of Authors, and I fully support it," he said. "Publishers are suffering badly themselves [at the moment] but it's a bit like Tesco and the farmers the author as the producer will be squeezed the most."

These days the former Microsoft boss Bill Gates devotes his time to running what has arguably become the most powerful charitable organisation in the world. Is this the future of giving - and, if so, is that a good thing?

The headquarters of probably the most powerful charity in the world, and one of the most quietly influential international organisations of any sort, currently stand between a derelict restaurant and a row of elderly car repair businesses. Gentrification has yet to fully colonise this section of the Seattle waterfront, and even the actual premises of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which, appropriately perhaps, used to be a cheque-processing plant, retain a certain workaday drabness. Only four storeys high, with long rows of windows but no hint of corporate gloss, its beige and grey box sits anonymously in the drizzly northern Pacific light.

There is no sign outside the building. There is not even an entrance from the street. Instead, visitors must take a side road, stop at a separate gatehouse, also unmarked, and introduce themselves to a security guard, of the eerily polite and low-key kind employed by ex-heads of state and the extremely rich. Once admitted, you cross a car park full of modest vehicles and, if you are lucky, glimpse one of the world-renowned health or poverty specialists working for the foundation, dressed in the confidently casual Seattle office uniform of chinos and rainproofs. Then you reach the reception: finally, there is a small foundation logo on the wall, and beside it a few lyrical photographs of children and farmers in much dustier and less prosperous places than Seattle. Only past the reception, almost hidden away on a landing, is there a reminder of the foundation's status and contacts: a vivid shirt in a glass case, presented during a visit by Nelson Mandela.

The low-lit corridors beyond have little of the scruffiness and bustle you often find at charities. The fast- expanding foundation staff (presently around 850 employees) are in increasing demand around the world: meeting governments, attending summits and conferences, and above all "in the field", as foundation people put it, checking on the progress of the hundreds of projects from drought-tolerant seeds to malaria vaccines to telephone banking for the developing world to which the organisation has given grants since it was founded in 1994.

In Seattle, maps of Africa and southern Asia, the foundation's main areas of activity outside America, are pinned up in the often empty, sparsely decorated offices and cubicles. There are also cuttings about the foundation's work from the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, not publications you might have previously associated with a big interest in global disease and poverty. And lying on the foundation's standard-issue, utilitarian desks, there are its confidently written and comprehensively illustrated reports: Ghana: An Overall Success Story is the title of one left in the unoccupied office I have been lent between interviews.

The foundation, in short, feels like a combination of a leftish thinktank, an elite management consultancy and a hastily expanding internet start-up. Is it the sort of institution that can really help the world's poorest people?

For 14 of the last 16 years Bill Gates has been the richest person on earth. More than a decade ago, he decided to start handing over the "large majority" of his wealth currently 36bn for the foundation to distribute, so that "the people with the most urgent needs and the fewest champions" in the world, as he and his wife Melinda put it on the foundation website, "grow up healthier, get a better education, and gain the power to lift themselves out of poverty". In 2006, Warren Buffett, currently the third richest person in the world, announced that he too would give a large proportion of his assets to the foundation. Its latest accounts show an endowment of 24bn, making it the world's largest private foundation. It is committed to spending the entire endowment within 50 years of Bill and Melinda Gates's deaths. Last year it awarded grants totalling 2bn.

As well as its money, it is the organisation's optimism and the fame of its main funder in 2008 Bill Gates stopped working full-time for his computer giant Microsoft to concentrate on the foundation that has given it momentum. Last May an editorial in the revered medical journal the Lancet praised it for giving "a massive boost to global health funding . . . The Foundation has challenged the world to think big and to be more ambitious about what can be done to save lives in low-income settings. The Foundation has added renewed dynamism, credibility, and attractiveness to global health [as a cause]."

Precise effects of big charity projects can be hard to measure, especially over a relatively short period. But already two bodies that the foundation funds heavily, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi) and the Global Fund to Fight HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, have, according to the foundation, delivered vaccines to more than 250 million children in poor countries and prevented more than an estimated five million deaths.

"The foundation has brought a new vigour," says Michael Edwards, a veteran charity commentator and usually a critic of billionaire philanthropists. "The charity sector can almost disempower itself; be too gloomy about things . . . Gates offers more of a positive story. He is a role model for other philanthropists, and he is the biggest."

"Everyone follows the Gates foundation's lead," says someone at a longer-established charity who prefers not to be named. "It feels like they're everywhere. Every conference I go to, they're there. Every study that comes out, they're part of. They have the ear of any [national] leadership they want to speak to. Politicians attach themselves to Gates to get PR. Everyone loves to have a meeting with Gates. No institution would refuse."

The foundation has branch offices in Washington DC, Delhi and Beijing. This year, it opened an office in London, not in one of the scruffy inner suburbs usually inhabited by charities, but close to the Houses of Parliament.

Seth Berkley, head of the International Aids Vaccine Initiative [IAVI], says: "The foundation has the advantage of speed and flexibility. When they want to, they can move quickly, unlike many other large bureaucracies. Most of the other private foundations in the US don't work globally. Others are more staid than Gates. I used to work at the Rockefeller Foundation [an older American charity] and dole out grants in small amounts. The Gates foundation gave us at IAVI a grant of $1.5m ( 1m), then $25m. Then they gave us a line of credit which is extremely unusual in grant-making of $100m, to give us assets to be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies and initiate vaccine development programmes. Using that $100m, we were able to leverage lots more funding $800m in total. What Gates allowed us to do was go out and search for new ideas and move quickly on them. The old way was to find the new ideas, and then look for a donor to back them."

Besides its dizzying grants, the foundation is also becoming a magnet for talented staff and collaborators. "We probably get more than our fair share of great external expertise and insight," says chief executive Jeff Raikes. foundation staff can have a certain self-assurance. When the history of global health is written, says Katherine Kreiss, the foundation officer overseeing its nutrition projects, "the start of the Gates foundation will absolutely be a seminal moment."

Some have reservations about this power and the use made of it. Mindful of the foundation's ubiquity, few in the charity world are prepared to criticise it on the record. But last May the Lancet published two authored articles on the foundation. "Grant-making by the Gates foundation," concluded one, "seems to be largely managed through an informal system of personal networks and relationships rather than by a more transparent process based on independent and technical peer review." The other article found that, "The research funding of the Foundation is heavily weighted towards the development of new vaccines and drugs, much of it high risk and even if successful likely to take at least the 20 years which Gates has targeted for halving child mortality."

In a forthcoming article for the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, Devi Sridhar, a global health specialist at Oxford University, describes as a "particularly serious problem" the "loss of health workers from the public sector to better funded NGOs offering better remuneration". She also suggests that the foundation, like other health organisations based in rich countries but active in the poor southern hemisphere, "[has] tended to fund . . . a large and costly global health bureaucracy and technocracy based in the north". The foundation responds, "Much of our grant-making goes to large intermediary partners that in turn provide funding and support to those doing the work in the field, often to developing country institutions. We're not able to provide a simple funding breakdown."

The rise of the foundation has been part of a larger revival of interest in the west in the problems of poor countries. This phenomenon has encompassed increased government aid budgets, initiatives by the World Health Organisation and World Bank, celebrity-led events and campaigns such as Live8, image-conscious corporate schemes, and countless private ventures, from the sober and long-term to the reactive, adventure-seeking, self-styled "extreme humanitarianism" currently being practised in Haiti by freelance American volunteers and breathlessly described in the July issue of Vanity Fair.

It is hard to see this explosion of activity as a wholly bad thing. But it does have political implications. "It's kind of [creating] a post-UN world," says someone close to the Gates foundation. "People have gotten interested in fast results." The UN, he says, is too slow and bureaucratic you could say democratic to achieve them. Critics of the new, more entrepreneurial aid industry such as the Dutch journalist Linda Polman, in her recent book War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times, see empire-building and wasteful competition as well as worthwhile altruism. "Everyone in global health is talking about poor coordination," says someone at a charity in that field. "The Gates foundation is contributing to the fragmentation and duplication."

And finally, a suspicion lingers, slowly fading but still there, that the foundation's activities are some sort of penance for Gates's world-dominating behaviour at Microsoft or a continuation of that world domination by other means. Both Raikes and his predecessor as foundation chief executive were at Microsoft; Raikes from 1981 to 2008, during which time he was the company's key figure after Gates and his co-founder Paul Allen.

As Raikes sits in his office, a little messy-haired, dressed in a zip-up jumper, fidgety in his chair and brisk in his answers, he even seems a bit like Gates. "There are some real cultural differences between the Gates foundation and Microsoft," he says. "Some of that's good and some of that's not so good. The foundation is in a stage of . . . maturation. In philanthropy there is kind of a culture of, [he puts on a slightly airy-fairy voice] 'You and I are here to help the world, and so we can't disagree.' At Microsoft, people would really throw themselves into the fray. I'm trying to encourage that here."

He offers only limited reassurance to those who consider the foundation too powerful. "We're not replacing the UN," he says. "But some people would say we're a new form of multilateral organisation." Is the foundation too ubiquitous? He smiles: "There are many people who want us to be much more involved than we want."

Since Raikes joined the foundation in 2008, it has nevertheless broadened its activities. "Today we focus in on 25 key areas," he says, then starts ticking them off on his strong fingers: "Eradicate malaria. Eradicate polio. Reduce the burden of HIV, tuberculosis, diarrhoea, pneumonia . . ." Why not concentrate on fewer of these huge tasks? "You might say it's a little bit of a business way of doing things. There are limits to the amount of money we could invest in any given area." The foundation has so much money, it worries about saturating particular areas of need with grants and so achieving diminishing returns. Instead, says Raikes, "We think dollars-per-Daly in a big way."

Daly is an acronym for disability-adjusted life year, an increasingly common term in international aid and global health circles, which measures the number of years of healthy life lost to either severe illness or disability or premature death in a given population. The idea that suffering and its alleviation can be measured with some precision is characteristic of the foundation's technocratic, optimistic thinking.

The charity also seeks to maximise its impact though partnerships. It does not, for example, conduct medical research or distribute vaccines itself; instead it gives grants to those it considers the best specialists: "We think of ourselves as catalytic philanthropists," says Raikes. He confirms the widely held view sometimes meant as a criticism that the health solutions the foundation favours are usually technical: "The foundation is really oriented towards the science and technology way of thinking. We're not really the organisation that's involved in bed-nets for malaria. We're much more involved in finding a vaccine."

The foundation's health strategy is undergoing an internal review led by Girindre Beeharry, a pin-sharp youngish man from Mauritius who studied economics at the Sorbonne and Oxford. "The iconic story we all tell about the foundation," he says, "is, if you had been in polio [medicine] 50 years ago, and your only instrument [to combat it] had been the iron lung, the orthodox approach would have been, 'How can we distribute iron lungs to Africa?' Or you could have spent some of your dollars on developing a polio vaccine which is how we think."

Ignacio Mas, another fast-talking foundation man who did his economics at Harvard and specialises in financial services for the poor, adds: "If you have this mindset of finding big solutions for big problems, that means technology, in practical terms. Because that is really the only thing that can transform."

Aware of how much they have already changed the world through their businesses, computer tycoons can turn into impatient broader reformers. Google co-founder Sergey Brin is currently funding an attempt to revolutionise the search for a cure for Parkinson's disease. Gates himself grew up in a charity-conscious environment: his mother Mary, a teacher, and his father William H Gates Sr, a well-connected Seattle lawyer, were both active in United Way, the international community service organisation. The Gates family were prosperous, and lived in the hushed and idyllic suburb of Laurelhurst, but Seattle is an outward-looking, conscientious place: in the 1980s Mary led a successful campaign to persuade the local university to withdraw its investments from apartheid South Africa.

By the early 90s, Bill Gates had started giving money to local schools and charities. But the donations were small compared to the billions he was earning, and he was too focused on Microsoft to pay much attention to the growing number of begging letters that his wealth and fame attracted. His parents, privately, and Seattle journalists, publicly, began to suggest that he should be more civic-minded. Then in 1995 he published The Road Ahead, a book he had co-written about the future of computing. Its sometimes bland corporate prose, Microsoft's domineering reputation and Gates' then unloved public persona meant that it received mixed reviews. Yet, read now, with the subsequent establishment of the foundation in mind, the book contains striking digressions about the world's "sociological problems" and "the gap between the have and have-not nations". There is a sense of Gates becoming curious about the world's non-software needs and how he might help address them.

In 1994 he and his father had set up the William H Gates Foundation. Gates Sr ran it from his basement. Gates Jr wrote the cheques. The causes he backed were broader than before: birth control and reproductive health. As the foundation expanded, he and Melinda, whom he had met at Microsoft, both found themselves becoming more and more interested in the wider world. "I started to learn about poor countries and health, and got drawn in," Gates told students at Berkeley during a speaking tour this spring. "I saw the childhood death statistics. I said, 'Boy, is this terrible!'"

Gates has a tendency to talk about the horrors and injustices of the developing world just as he talks about the computer business: in blunt, jerky sentences, his nasal voice flat or leaping, his manner without much natural warmth or charm. He sounds like a clever man in a hurry thinking out loud which is exactly what he is. Starting in the late 90s, he began to hungrily chew through the expert literature on global disease and nutrition and poverty. "He is a giant sponge," says an epidemiologist who specialises in HIV. "I had dinner with him a couple of weeks ago. The man is extraordinary. I've been in the field 15 years, and his grasp of the technical details is just astounding. His weird brain allows him to ask questions."

In 1999 the William H Gates Foundation and a separate charity Bill Gates had established to improve computer access in American libraries were combined into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As the couple grew richer through Microsoft, so they started making intermittent donations to a trust (from 2006 known as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Asset Trust), which invested the accumulating assets. Those in turn were donated to the foundation.

"In the early days, it was crazy," says Katharine Kreiss, who joined from the American foreign service in 2002 and is refreshingly less on-message than more recent recruits. "There were so few people. I was one of 17 in total covering global health. By law in the US, as a charity you have to spend 5% of your endowment [annually], so you're always trying to meet this number. When I started, we gave out about $1.5bn, the same as my department had when I was in the government, where I think we had a staff of 4,000! When I came into the foundation, I had 172 grants I was working on. There weren't the people to do the rigour. We have so changed since. Now I have eight grants and I'm overwhelmed. I'm working on them in a much more detailed way."

Gates is also much more involved. Since 2008 he and Melinda have begun regularly visiting the foreign projects it supports. "About 18 to 24 months in advance, they're thinking about what trips they might go on," says Kreiss. "Then they winnow down the options. We send them briefing notes. It's really like working with a high-level principal in the government. If it's your project, you will probably do an advance trip or two. Bill and Melinda will send their own advance team to look at logistics." Then, sometimes accompanied by one or two carefully chosen journalists, the world's second richest couple will visit homes or clinics in some of the world's most blighted regions. "I've never actually been on a trip with Bill and Melinda," says Kreiss. "But there are many questions. I've heard it's just nonstop questions. There's no downtime. Not a minute. It's not a vacation."

When they are back in Seattle, where they still live, Bill and Melinda have the use of offices at the foundation on a secluded top-floor corridor, along with Raikes and Gates Sr. This part of the building is slightly plusher there are lights concealed in pillars and one corridor wall is an expensive-looking gold colour - but it is hardly palatial. Bill Gates's status is denoted by something subtler: the sudden care with which foundation staff from Raikes downwards start choosing their words when the subject of Gates and his wife comes up. "The foundation is their vision, their mission," says Kreiss. Roy Steiner, the foundation's deputy director for agriculture (Harvard, ex-management consultant), tells me: "Bill has just recently spent a night in an Indian village. He slept in a hut in a village. How many chairs of philanthropic organisations have done that? But he's a business guy he wants to understand the customer."

Outsiders who work with the foundation are sometimes less enthusiastic about his role. "Everyone in that organisation spends their whole time second-guessing what Bill will say," says one. "They've got very smart people, but they're always waiting for Bill." According to the foundation, Gates and his wife "review" only its grants that exceed $50m, but Bill Gates's influence can also be felt in much smaller foundation matters. Recently, an academic paper covering an area in which the charity is highly active, written by someone Gates knew quite well, was held back from him by foundation staff. "We can't show it to him," the author of the paper was told. "We think he won't like it. The problem is the title of the paper. It includes a word Bill is allergic to."

Yet sometimes, the author continues, Gates is more open-minded than his subordinates anticipate: "If you can capture his imagination, he will listen to any idea. He's willing to say, 'Let's look at this.'" This year, alongside the foundation's slick official website, a quirkier and more personal one began appearing called the Gates Notes, with sections called "What I'm Thinking About", "What I'm Learning" and "My Travels", and musings and recommendations on green technology, the financial crisis and the computer business as well as on the foundation's existing activities. There is a sense of Gates, still only 54 and liberated from his round-the-clock Microsoft duties, constantly roaming beyond his charity's already vast boundaries. The internet, the modern power of celebrity, and the ease of travel to virtually anywhere in the world enjoyed by the super-rich, has made it possible for the more thoughtful, socially conscious of them such as Gates and the financier George Soros to become autodidacts and philosopher-kings more potent even than the last generation of famous philanthropists, such as Andrew Carnegie and John D Rockefeller.

Last May, Gates, Soros, Buffett and David Rockefeller Jr, Rockefeller's great-grandson, held a long private meeting in New York, not far from the UN, along with an assortment of media potentates such as Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Bloomberg. It was reported that Gates had been involved in summoning them all together; and that the Good Club, as it supposedly called itself, discussed the world's economic, environmental and health problems, the dangers of over-population, and how rich people could better help poor people. The Sunday Times quoted an unnamed participant at the meeting, who said that without anything "as crude as a vote" the gathering had agreed that the world's problems "need big-brain answers . . . independent of government".

For the internet's many Gates-watchers and conspiracy-spotters, it was all irresistibly sinister. Last month an apparently more benign explanation appeared. A friend of Gates and Buffett, Carol Loomis, wrote in the tycoon-watchers' magazine Fortune that the gathering had been part of a behind-the-scenes campaign by the two men and Melinda Gates, which was now ready to go public, to persuade the rest of America's billionaires to pledge at least 50% of their wealth to charity.

Like the Gates foundation, the initiative seems laudable and refreshing in many ways especially given the discarding of any sense of social responsibility by so many of the rich in recent decades. Several of America's wealthiest families have already signed the pledge. And yet, some authorities on philanthropy fear the consequences of this giving boom, and dislike the faint air of playing god that hangs over its creations such as the Gates foundation. Edwards says: "The world isn't a giant experiment. The foundation affects real people in real places. Why should Bill decide which sort of vaccines get developed?

"If you read the early reports of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations," Edwards goes on, "those organisations have almost exactly the same character as the Gates foundation: top-down, technocratic, applying the language of engineering to social problems." Edwards has worked in the charity sector since 1978, through good times and bad, and he also warns: "You can have boom and bust in this kind of 'philanthrocapitalism' as in capitalism itself." Put crudely, the super-rich need to stay super-rich for their charitable enterprises to function.

The value of the Gates foundation's endowment fell by a fifth during the 2008 banking crisis, although Raikes says the foundation did not cut its grant-making during the downturn, and its finances have recovered since. The ethical basis of the foundation's finances has also been questioned. In 2007 an extensive investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that the charity, via its trust, invests in "companies that contribute to the human suffering in health, housing and social welfare that the foundation is trying to alleviate". The foundation did not challenge the thrust of the articles, which included allegations that it invested in an oil company responsible for causing health problems by burning off its unwanted gas, in an African country in which the foundation was active in trying to improve the population's health. But the charity decided after a brief review not to change its investment policy. Raikes's predecessor Patty Stonesifer wrote to the newspaper: "The stories you told of people who are suffering touched us all. But it is naive to suggest that an individual stockholder can stop that suffering. Changes in our investment practices would have little or no impact on these issues."

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Asset Trust has always refused to invest in tobacco firms; otherwise, the outside investment managers the trust employs are instructed to seek the maximum return on its endowment, so that the foundation can be as generous as possible. It is a moral trade-off; but then uncomfortable compromises, like unequal power relationships, run through most charitable work.

Many of the Gates foundation's critics concede that the organisation is, as Edwards puts it, "closer to the best than the worst" on the spectrum of private charitable foundations: more expertly staffed, more focused on the problems where charity is most needed, more professional there have so far been no obviously disastrous foundation-funded projects and more prepared to change as it grows.

Raikes's desire for fiercer internal debates at the foundation may be an acknowledgement that Gates needs to be challenged more. And Gates may want to be challenged more: according to Beeharry, among Gates's current reading is a 2005 group biography of president Abraham Lincoln's inner circle, Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin: "Bill think it's the best book ever written. It's about how you embrace dissent as a leader." Lincoln's "genius", writes Goodwin, was "to form friendships with men who had previously opposed him; to repair injured feelings; to assume responsibility for the failures of subordinates; to share credit with ease; and to learn from mistakes." Given his driven decades at Microsoft, it may be hard to imagine Gates being interested in such softer qualities; but then it was hard not so long ago to imagine him giving most of his money away.

Next year the foundation is scheduled to move into new premises. Instead of the present hidden-away headquarters, and two even blander buildings it uses a mile away staff have to shuttle between them all by minibus the foundation will occupy a much showier hilltop "campus" in central Seattle, all dark glass and golden stone, with office blocks like ocean liners, space for at least twice the current staff, and a visitor centre the size of a small supermarket for the public to learn about the foundation's good works. On the windows of the unfinished visitor centre, there are quotes from selected thinkers. One is from the famous American anthropologist Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

The way Gates and his elite staff have chosen to try to do so is by running their charity as a kind of business. Edwards calls this approach increasingly popular at private foundations funded by business-people philanthrocapitalism; others call it "venture philanthropy". Steiner explains: "Sitting here in Seattle, we're not going to solve Africa's problems. Africans are going to solve Africa's problems. We've got to find the Africans." Often, this means the foundation mounting competitions for grant applications, and giving money to the winners, which usually means the most "pioneering" (Steiner's word) and those that promise to fulfil a need not met by other charities.

Foundation staff describe this process, and indeed all their work, in business-school language: achieving "leverage", building the foundation "brand", serving "markets" and "customers". Or they use the language of management consultancy and computing: "Bill is about numbers," says Steiner. "He wants to see the data. He values data more than ideology."

Like all the foundation staff I meet, Steiner is personable and thoughtful, sitting tieless in his modest office. And like the others, he is both intensely idealistic and close to disdainful about the older, less business-orientated charity models. In his field of agricultural aid, he says, "We need a lot of smarter ways of doing things. We can't do things the same old way . . . The people who've been in the field for so long [for other charities] don't embrace how much transformation can happen. You walk in there as clear-eyed as you can . . . And [you] are basically optimistic that people want to improve their lives. You enable them with technology and knowledge, and great and wonderful things can happen."

He looks into the middle distance as the soft Seattle summer drizzle hangs outside his window. With his strong gaze and open-necked striped shirt, his shelves crammed with agriculture books and box files, his line of jars filled with brightly coloured seeds on a table against the wall, and his slightly impatient body language, as if just about to set off on another of his frequent trips to Africa or Asia, he seems a little like a high-minded Victorian explorer.

But Steiner and his colleagues are probably more aware of their limitations. There is a problem with the Gates foundation that its staff, for the time being, appear to grasp better than its critics. For all the charity's resources and connections, for all the attendant risks of over-confidence and over-mightiness, on the ground in Africa or Asia the foundation's immense-sounding grants are a miniscule fraction of what is required to create a fairer world. "In agriculture," says Steiner, "the problem's this big" he throws out his long arms "and our resources are this big" he pinches an inch of air between a finger and thumb. With an ex-management consultant's preciseness, he concludes: "We estimate we can probably be 3-5% of the overall solution."

Then he abruptly gets up from the meeting table, turns away from me without a goodbye handshake, and goes back to his desk and computer. At the Gates foundation, they are very keen that meetings do not overrun. There is much work to be done.

Lucy Cooke's Vimeo film is just what the Sheffield Doc/Fest judges are looking for

Within a week of visiting the world's only sloth orphanage in Costa Rica last year, Lucy Cooke had made a rough-and-ready 90-second clip that was being watched by more than 160,000 people a day. Her decision to "go and shoot a bunch of sloths" put her at the epicentre of online viral video.

With her original footage still attracting thousands of eyeballs daily, Cooke is now in final talks with broadcasters about producing a full-length documentary. "I posted the 90-second video on my Vimeo site and very quickly it was favourited [sic] and pushed by Vimeo staff," she explains. "I then put the word out via my personal Facebook page and also my Amphibian Avenger Facebook and Twitter feeds. The video was then tweeted and retweeted by a few key friends who have a lot of fans."

Cooke's clip really took off after being tweeted by Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry."It was watched by 1 million people in the first 10 days," she says. "The video has now been watched by over 2 million people if you include YouTube and all the people who ripped it and posted it as their own work on YouTube and other sites."

Cooke gained insight into marketing video last year at a workshop by the digital media organisation Crossover, which will host public workshops around the UK in the run-up to the Sheffield Doc/Fest in November. Cooke is just the kind of person that this year's competition, which is supported by MediaGuardian, is hoping to attract. Entries for the Digital Revolutions category open today.

Says the Doc/Fest director, Heather Croall: "This time we're taking the computer age into a new world. We're going to get people to put their video up on YouTube or Vimeo and really get creative in the digital landscape. As well as producing a great three-minute video, judges will be looking strongly at how film-makers have gone about engaging their audience and building a community around their film."

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, is providing a cash prize of 10,000 to be won by a non-professional film-maker at Doc/Fest who can deliver more than just clever video editing.

And Cooke's advice to this year's entrants? "Choose a popular subject look online at what videos and what subjects go viral," she says. "My video is essentially strong, cute and funny animals cut to music one of the most popular genres of viral.

"Look for internet sites which collect videos like yours and send them your link asking them to plug it. Definitely use Twitter and Facebook. Half the job is making something good, the other half is working the marketing of it."

To enter, go to sheffdocfest.com. You can watch the sloths at vimeo.com/11712103

This article was amended on 12 July 2010 to clarify that BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, is providing the 10,000 prize at Doc/Fest

Three computer experts reveal how their office lives compare with the TV comedy

Wondered what the real-life counterparts of Jen, Moss and Roy make of Graham Linehan's much-loved sitcom? We asked three tech-heads to tell us what they think.

IT project manager Shaheen, 38, is married with two children and lives in Cheshire. Technical architect Harry, 34, is separated with two children and works in Greater Manchester. Account manager Bob, 31, works for a major IT outsourcing firm in Greater Manchester.

Do people like Moss, Jen and Roy really exist?

Shaheen: People like Jen exist there's one in our department, who was hired to translate between the geeks and the management but she doesn't have a clue what she's doing.

Harry: People like Moss and Roy exist less and less, because the competencies you need tend to mean you're multi-skilled, so you can't just ignore people and sit in front of a screen all day.

Bob: The Jen figures aren't exclusively female. There are plenty of men with top jobs in project managing who don't know the first thing about IT.

Can you spot IT people by their clothes?

Bob: Yes. One guy I work with has a utility belt. It's got his PDA, his personal GPS unit and multiple phones on it. He's got his pants dead short, and he never speaks to anyone.

Harry: T-shirts [Harry shows his Darth Vader T-shirt with the caption: "I Am Your Father"].

Shaheen: I think it's generally a guy thing. Though I have been known to wear the occasional rock T-shirt to the office.

Are IT people treated with contempt and hidden in a basement, as they are in the show?

Shaheen: When I've worked on site, IT people have a godlike status. I've had factory foreman shouting at staff, telling them what they can and can't do, based on my word and whim, so I've seen the opposite.

Harry: It's quite central to The IT Crowd that the department is stuffed away somewhere, and that isn't the way we work. Going back a few years, it was like that, and people used to complain that we were obnoxious, a bit prickly, difficult to talk to when they needed something sorted out. Now, it's moved, and it's very much integrated with the rest of the business.

Bob: More and more businesses are getting rid of their IT departments. It's all about self service now, and any technical needs are outsourced. In that respect, I think the show is documenting a dying culture. I think it was dying even when the show started.

Do IT people lack social skills?

Harry: There's quite a few stereotypical geeks in our department, but only one or two with no social skills.

Shaheen: One guy I worked with built a wall of box files around the edges of his desk so that people wouldn't look at him. I think IT does attract a few obsessive, slightly odd personalities, definitely.

Bob: Less and less, though what's happening to these people is perhaps a mystery. I think a lot of them have been forced to take on more business-focused roles.

Are IT people particularly into geeky pursuits?

Bob: There's people in the office who spend 20-30 hours a week on Warcraft. But I think you'd find people like that in the rest of the male population.

Harry: Guys on the coding team go home and work on open source stuff in their spare time, and I must confess, one of my hobbies is to build virtual machines when I'm not at work.

Shaheen: I think the only way I can relate to a lot of the stuff that goes on is that I'm into metal and rock that subculture is massive among IT types.

Does the IT sector respect diversity?

Bob: There is sexism in IT. There are very few women in technical roles.

Harry: Where I work, there is a representative number of ethnic minorities and two women on the configuration team.

Shaheen: I've sat in meetings where senior consultants said: "She's not going to do anything" and "She doesn't know about it." I took it at the time, because I was new, but sexism is a very real thing in IT.

Does the advice "turn it on and off" really work?

Bob: With surprising regularity. From an outsider's point of view, that is everything that we do.

Harry: It solves 80% of problems. You've got to know when to switch it on and off. Switch it off, wait 10 seconds, then switch it on, that's the trick.

Shaheen: It does, but IT people dress it up. They'll say, "Have you given it a service reboot?" There's quite a few euphemisms they've developed because it's often effective. Like a "power recycling", "refresh" and things like that.

The company is replacing some failed devices within a specified serial number range - but an internal note earlier this year had a much wider range. Is Apple stiffing some people who deserve a new model?

The news that Apple will replace dead Time Capsules without question if their serial number lies in a particular range (XX807XXXXXX - XX814XXXXXX) is welcome for those whose machines lie inside that group - which Apple says means they were sold between February and June 2008. The symptoms: "Some Time Capsules... may not power on or may shut down unexpectedly after starting up." As we have pointed out, this is due to an overheating fault in some of the electronics around the power supply. Inside the Time Capsule (which combines a wireless cable modem with a backup drive), the hard drive is fine (and so is your data), but you need to rehouse the disk to get it back.

But the Guardian has also seen the text of an email that was sent to Apple Genius Bars earlier this year, to confirm free work authorisation on dead Time Capsules. And that has a very different range of serial numbers which are eligible for replacement with or without Applecare (Apple's after-sales warranty extension).

The serials there are xx807xxxxxxx through xx852xxxxxxx - very much broader than those in the statement yesterday.

So is Apple trying to stiff people whose devices have broken down? We've been helped in analysing this by Pim van Bochoven, of the Time Capsule Memorial Register, who had a site which crowdsourced serial numbers, purchase dates, sizes and other information about the failed machines.

Pim kindly sent us the (anonymised) dump from his database - so no email addresses or other identifying information - which has 2,500 entries, of which all but 82 have serial numbers. So that's a sample of 2418 serial numbers.

We analysed the failed devices' serials against Apple's public range, and found that a remarkable 2261 of them fall inside it - that's 93.5% of those with serials (90% of all of them, though it's reasonable to think that the missing serials would have been distributed in the same way as those of the failed machines - in which case you'd expect that 76 of the 82 fall into the range).

But what about the wider range - up to xx852? Further analysis shows that there are 119 failed devices which have serials between xx815xxxxxx and xx852xxxxxx, and a further 37 with serials above that, or below the xx807xxxxxx range (actually, there's exactly 1 below it).

So in short: Apple is concentrating on the vast majority of failures. It's clear there was some sort of manufacturing screwup in a batch of devices, but of course that only came to light when they reached their failure point, which was about 19 months after they'd been made. It would be interesting to know whether the fault was discovered at the manufacturing stage - might it even have been a follow-on from the famous flawed capacitor problem? - or whether the end of the largest spike in failures was by chance.

It's notable, after all, that there are still failures - but what's not clear is how frequent those failures are compared to the number of devices sold. To figure out the latter, one would need to do some German tank analysis on the serial numbers - but if we can persuade van Bochoven to let us put the database out there, perhaps some can do that, and we'll know just how out of whack the failure rate was.

We did ask Apple why it had changed the recommended replacement range between its internal note and its statement yesterday. It had not replied at the time this blog post went live.

Microsoft has announced that it is 'hardcore' about Windows 7-based slate machines

Steve Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, has announced at the Worldwide Partner Conference that the company is serious about the upcoming Windows 7 slate computers.

Despite not mentioning competitors by name, it appears the move is part of Microsoft's counter-offensive against both the latest generation of smartphones and the second wave of tablet computers from Apple, Archos and Fusion Garage. With the iPad selling more than 3m units in the first 80 days on the market, this is a fast-growing market and Microsoft wants a slice of it. "This is a terribly important area for us," Ballmer said.

Stressing that the upcoming devices will arrive in a variety of shapes, sizes and prices, Ballmer expects the Windows-powered tablets to take a slice of both the home and enterprise environments. The devices will sport tight integration into other Microsoft solutions, which they hope will spur business adoption.

This is not Microsoft's first attempt at tablet computing Windows XP Tablet PC edition was launched in 2001, with the device barely making an impact on the market. The technology was not fully developed and the tablets did not have a target market, making them an expensive anomaly among cheaper laptops and PDAs. The second wave of tablets is aimed purely at the multimedia market, bringing together the internet and digital content in an intermit setting.

As an interesting side note, HP is included as one of the hardware partners working with Microsoft on these devices, but after acquiring Palm back in April, it is assumed that the HP Slate will use Palm's WebOS instead of Windows on the upcoming Slate.

The other partners include the usual suspects of Lenovo, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Pansonic and Asus. Will these other partners come through to create devices that can match up to their rivals? How do you think the Windows powered offerings will stack up against the iPad and joojoo? Give us your thoughts below

Judge says punishment is 'still severe' after reducing filesharer's fine from $675,000 to $67,500

A graduate student who was ordered to pay $675,000 for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs has had the fine reduced by 90%.

Lawyers acting on behalf of Joel Tenenbaum said they felt "vindicated" after the fine was slashed to $67,500 by the same judge who presided over his original trial in 2009. Tenenbaum was successfully sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) last year after he admitted downloading songs between 1999 and 2007.

"There is no question that this reduced award is still severe, even harsh," said judge Gertner. "Reducing the jury's $675,000 award also sends another no less important message: the due process clause does not merely protect large corporations, like BMW and State Farm, from grossly excessive punitive awards. It also protects ordinary people like Joel Tenenbaum."

In July 2009, Tenenbaum was ordered to pay the equivalent of $22,500 per song for illegally sharing 30 tracks through the peer-to-peer site KaZaA. The case came to court after Tenenbaum contested a fine imposed on him by the RIAA in the late 1990s, while he was still a teenager. He is now a postgraduate student at Boston University. Following the original ruling last year, Tenebaum said he would be forced to file for bankruptcy.

Speaking about the latest ruling, Tenebaum said that although he was happy that the fine had been reduced, he would still not be able to pay: "I don't have $70,000, and $2,000 per song still seems ridiculous in light of the fact that you can buy them for 99 cents on iTunes."

Tenenbaum's defence said: "We feel vindicated that judge Gertner agreed that $675,000 was an unconstitutional award. But it is only a step along the way toward recognising the abusiveness of the RIAA's litigation campaign. The next step is to demonstrate that Joel was denied a fair jury trial when judge Gertner told the jury in her instructions that it could award an unconstitutionally excessive amount."

The RIAA has expressed its dissatisfaction with the latest turn of events, saying that it will contest the reduction.

The ruling coincides with the prosecution of a father and son in north-east England, who were charged with profiting from unlicensed digital jukeboxes. Malcolm and Peter Wylie were sentenced to three years and nine months in prison respectively for supplying, installing and distributing jukeboxes to pubs and clubs across the north-east.

Apple employs 25,000 people in the US but the Chinese company that make its products has 800,000 employees. Time to rethink the model, says John Naughton

As is well known in these quarters, Apple makes beautiful kit. Actually, that's not quite true. Apple designs beautiful kit, but the stuff is made by Foxconn, a huge oriental company. That's why, on the back of my iPad, it says: "Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China." And therein lie a number of tales.

The standard narrative is the ironic one about rich westerners with more money than sense enjoying luxury gadgets manufactured by poorly paid Chinese workers under commercial security so paranoid that it has allegedly led to suicides. But there are other narratives which receive less attention. The one that concerns me just now is what all this "designed in California, made somewhere else" syndrome means for us.

This thought was prompted by a recent broadside from Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, the world's leading chip-maker. In the real world, Mr Grove may not be exactly a household name, but in the computing business nobody sleeps at the back when he's talking.

He's famous for the mantra: "Only the paranoid survive", which summed up his attitude to competition when he ran Intel. But as well as being fanatically competitive, he's also far-sighted and perceptive. In 1999, for example, he became briefly notorious for predicting that "in five years' time, companies that aren't internet companies won't be companies at all".

Grove was widely ridiculed for this statement. Was he saying, critics inquired sarcastically, that every fast-food joint and grocer would have to be into e-commerce by 2004? Not at all: what he meant was that the internet would become an everyday utility like electricity, something that every company uses, but very few generate, and none can do without. And he was right.

In an essay entitled "How to Make an American Job Before It's Too Late", Grove pointed out that whereas Apple has 25,000 employees in the US, Foxconn has 250,000 in southern China alone. "The company," he points out, "has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenue last year was $62bn, larger than Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp, Dell Inc or Intel. Foxconn employs more than 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Co, Intel and Sony Corp."

Grove cited these figures to attack what he regards as a pernicious mindset that now afflicts government policymakers in most western countries "Our own misplaced faith in the power of start-ups to create US jobs. Americans love the idea of the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world. New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called 'Start-Ups, Not Bailouts'. His argument: let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back start-ups."

Grove thinks this is baloney and he's right. Start-ups are wonderful but at least in technology they generally don't create jobs on the scale that western economies need. What really matters is what comes after that eureka moment in the garage, as the new idea goes from prototype to mass production. "This is the phase," Grove writes, "where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter."

At the moment, any successful start-up engaged in scaling up will immediately plan to outsource production to China or Taiwan, because it's the economically rational thing to do. As a result, most of the jobs created by the new idea will not be in the US (or Britain) but somewhere in the far east. "No problem," say the venture capitalists who are funding the process. "The intellectual property and the value stay here while the grunt-work of mass production goes elsewhere."

All of which is true. But consider the outcome: the new company has a smallish number of highly qualified (and well-paid) workers in its home base, oodles of incoming revenue (eventually) and a great deal of government and media approval. But the only other jobs it creates will be in low-paid service occupations cleaning, warehousing, shipping and the like.

And so the hollowing out of western economies continues, even as they continue to be powerhouses of innovation and technological ingenuity. Every time you buy the latest gizmo smartphone, tablet, flat-screen TV, broadband router, camera you're an unwitting participant in it. And it's all the product of our fanatical commitment to economic rationality.

The Greeks used to say that those whom the gods wished to destroy, they first made mad. Now it seems that they just make them rational.

Experiments like 'Please Rob Me' indicate that what people reveal via location-sharing apps could potentially be harmful to them - and survey finds concerns among users

More than half of people with geolocation-capable mobile devices worry about "loss of privacy" from using their location-sharing features, a survey has found - even though location-sharing apps such as FourSquare and Gowalla have millions of users checking in every day.

Among UK respondents, 52% said they were "very or extremely concerned" about loss of privacy from using location-sharing applications - even though the same proportion said that they geotag photos, indicating where they were taken, when uploading them to the internet.

The survey, commissioned by security company Webroot, interviewed 1,500 owners of devices with geolocation capabilities, including 624 people in the UK.

Yet other data shows that there are more than 1m lonely hearts now looking for location-based love via an iPhone application, and touching two million users checking-in with Foursquare, sharing whereabouts is the social currency du jour.

But that can be risky, as a trio of developers showed earlier this year, grabbing the headlines when they launched Please Rob Me, a live stream of people sharing their location on Twitter, the site playing on the fact these people were out of their homes. After doing what it set out to do - bring attention to the risk associated with location sharing - the stream was turned off.

Yet FourSquare and Gowalla have continued their upward trajectory of users, investors and commercial partners, such as Dominos Pizza, the Huffington Post, MTV and the Wall Street Journal.

But according to David Bennett, director for Webroot in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, "It's not about securing the hardware anymore, it's about securing the person as mobile internet-connected devices become widespread." He reiterates the challenges associated with attitudes towards publishing personal information online: "If you look over the last year, it takes about a year for people to be educated about putting stuff on Facebook - I think it'll take that same amount of time for geolocation applications."

This, Bennett says, gets to the nub of the concern: "A lot of people don't necessarily know what they do or what the implications are of these services. Of the half that thought there was a problem, how many people know that the pictures they're taking can be geotagged? Say if you move into a new house, and you say 'Here's a picture of my house', you then take a picture of you and your family on holiday - this is where cybercrime really expands. What's to stop a certain segment of the marketplace burgling your house? That's the challenge as we go forward."

"I think it's the new version of the telephone directory," Bennett says of the presence of food chains on Foursquare. "Can you be sure the company you're interacting with is really the company? That's one of the biggest challenges. when you rang them up you knew it was them - if it's online how can you be sure? But that's the way the business marketplace is going to go - the next generation of bringing people to the doorstep."

And to the doorstep goods and services will come. Skout is a location-based "social dating application" that connects singletons within metres or miles of your exact location. Last week Skout welcomed both profitability and its one millionth user. But news like this is anathema to the cause of "securing the person". Bennett continues the refrain: "When you're online it's so easy to pretend to be someone you're not. Everyone's hidden behind the keyboard if you start going into some of these dating areas.

"There are certain parts of our information that should always be private. It comes down to people understanding what they're doing."

The research

Webroot commissioned a survey of 1,645 social network users (including 624 UK-based) who own geolocation-ready mobile devices on June 7 and June 8 2010.
- 39% (around 600 of the sample) of mobile device users use location-tracking applications on their mobile phone
73% of those use a "geo-tracking application" to do so
Of this 73%, more than a quarter used location-based services to share their whereabouts with "strangers" and 14% use them to meet new people
55% of respondents said they worry over loss of privacy incurred from using geolocation data
One in 11 respondents have used geolocation applications to meet a stranger, either digitally or in person. This is predominantly within the 18-29 age group
64% have accepted a friend request from a stranger
41% are "aware or extremely concerned" about letting "potential burglars know when they are not at home"
In the UK, 46% of women are "highly concerned" about "letting a stalker know where they are," compared to 27% of men
52% of UK respondents tag their whereabouts in a photograph online
In the past year, 30% of UK respondents have shared their geographical location with "people other than their friends"

Composer David Cope has spent the last 30 years teaching computers to create classical music

Hear an example from David Cope's Emily Howell project
Download an Emmy Bach-style invention

Where does music come from? If pressed on this question, many of us would say it comes from the "soul", or from the "heart" of the person who composed it. That music is the clearest expression of human emotion, one person to another; that certain chords, certain melodies seem to communicate a whole language of feeling. When we listen to a Beethoven symphony or a Chopin sonata, we are hearing, we might say, the authentic expression of the composer's inner harmonies and discords, carried magically across the centuries. Could we ever be so moved by a piece of music written by a computer? We'd probably like to think not. David Cope, emeritus professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, would beg to differ. "The question," Cope tells me, "isn't if computers possess a soul, but if we possess one."

Cope, now 69, has devoted the past 30 years of his life to what amounts to an obsessive examination of that particular question. He began, almost by default, back in 1980, with a severe case of writer's block. One of America's most acclaimed young composers, whose music had been performed at Carnegie Hall, and won great critical praise, Cope had been commissioned to write an opera. For weeks and months he sat at his piano, or stared at a blank piece of sheet music; nothing came. He had a wife and four children to support. In desperation he started playing with a computer.

What he found there changed his life and, perhaps, the course of musical history. Cope had long held the belief that all music was essentially inspired plagiarism. The great composers absorbed the music that had gone before them and their brains "recombined" melodies and phrases in distinctive, sometimes traceable, ways. We all have an internal database of musical reference; composers were those with the ability to manipulate it in new patterns. With the aid of an early computer, he realised he could put this to the test.

His first experiments with artificial musical intelligence were clunky, synthesised pieces, pastiches of easily identifiable work; but slowly, programming and reprogramming, inputting vast amounts of coded reference, he came to see how he might begin to shape a musical memory. The Eureka moment came one afternoon in 1983 after he had been working for a while trying to take apart and put back together chorales (four-part vocal hymns) in the style of JS Bach. He had a rules-based program, complicated and code-heavy, but it never produced anything approaching life or surprise.

That afternoon, on the way to the local store, he came to realise that Bach didn't exist in his predictability, but in the minute, multiple places where he broke his own rules, where he defied expectation of a particular progression. Cope developed "a little analytical engine" that could insert some randomness within the predictability. He began to analyse Bach's music not just mathematically but with a sense of narrative tension and surprise, weighting different components according to his own feel for the music's "storytelling" power. His program, at this point, seemed to develop a personality of its own; "Experiments in Musical Intelligence" became Emmy. When fed with enough of a composer's work, Emmy could deconstruct it, identify signature elements, and recombine them in new ways. One day Cope pushed a button on Emmy, went out to get a sandwich and when he returned his workaholic creation had produced 5,000 original Bach chorales. In 1993, Cope released an album, Bach by Design, and waited for the response.

When you listen to that album now and those that followed, including Virtual Mozart and, triumphantly, Virtual Rachmaninoff, you are discomfited and surprised in equal measure. Cope's work is far more than copying, it carries the recognisable DNA of the original style and fashions it into something recognisable but entirely new. The musical establishment reacted at first with alarm, and then with vitriol. Cope found it difficult to get any serious musicians to play Emmy's work, though it made many of the same demands as the "real thing". Critics convinced themselves that they heard no authentic humanity in it, no depth of feeling, Cope was characterised as a composer without a heart; his recent memoir is called Tin Man.

One of the problems that the music highlighted was the fact that in Cope's terms, the music of Mozart, say, was endless in its possibilities. As he suggested when I spoke to him last week: "Because my program was continuing to pump out music like a spigot, it became a problem of: 'Why play this sonata and not that one?'" Cope has no doubt that Mozart in particular, with his structural genius, would if he'd had the means have utilised computerised intelligence in exactly the same way. When you remove the "human" element of the work, however, Cope recognised, you also lose a great deal of its urgency. "When you had the database figured out it was really a one-stroke deal: you pushed the button and out came hundreds and thousands of sonatas or whatever."

He realised that what made a composer properly understandable, properly "affecting", was in part the fact of mortality. Composers had to die, and the ending made sense of what had gone before. With this in mind, Cope unplugged Emmy six years ago; her work which he limited to 11,000 chosen pieces, was done. Emmy housed on an ancient Power Mac 7500 (discontinued in 1996) now sits idle in the corner of his office. Cope has subsequently been at work, nurturing Emmy's "daughter", Emily Howell, (the first name from her mother, the second from the Christian name of Cope's own father) with whom he has a far more "equal" relationship.

Emily Howell has a compendious memory that involves an intimate understanding of the works of 36 composers "starting with Palestrina, [an Italian court musician of the 16th century] and ending with David Cope in the 21st century". Their output is far more collaborative than that of Emmy. Cope will ask Emily a musical question, feeding in a phrase. Emily will respond with her own understanding of what happens next. Cope either accepts or declines the formula, much in the way he would if he was composing "conventionally".

"It is," he says, "a bit like dealing with a small child; the program is an empty pot and I dribble small bits of music into it, and it responds to what I have put in it's a process of carrots and sticks, really. I think it is producing good results but it takes a lot of time."

Cope's ambitions remain exactly what they were, when, as an asthmatic child in Phoenix, Arizona, he was moved to wonder by Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, and knew he had to be a composer himself. "My two goals are an original style and to create something I love," he says. "The program is a cat not a dog, it keeps itself to itself, you can't take it for walks. I can only generally pick it up and point it in the direction that I want it to go "

Emily Howell's first album, From Darkness, Light, composed in six movements and performed on two pianos, was released earlier this year. It was met largely with silence; the critics who were moved to respond did so with the usual sniffy constructs about "an absence of genuine humanity". Cope remains undaunted.

"People tell me they don't hear soul in the music," he says. "When they do that, I pull out a page of notes and ask them to show me where the soul is. We like to think that what we hear is soul, but I think audience members put themselves down a lot in that respect. The feelings that we get from listening to music are something we produce, it's not there in the notes. It comes from emotional insight in each of us, the music is just the trigger."

Emily is still a work in progress for Cope. He thinks she is getting towards a mature style. "Five years from now I believe she will really be somewhere," he says.

It must be a curious process, like watching an external mind working, I suggest. What has it taught him about himself? "Two things. That the mechanisms of the brain are incredibly simple, but that its ability to create extraordinary complexity should constantly amaze us."

Will Emily survive him? "She needs a provocateur," Cope says, "but then so do humans. You cannot create music without reference to other music. Like us, she needs to be turned on to something."

He can't imagine the possibility of going back to writing with just his own intuition and a pen and paper. "The programs are just extensions of me. And why would I want to spend six months or a year to get to a solution that I can find in a morning? I have spent nearly 60 years of my life composing, half of it in traditional ways and half of it using technology. To go back would be like trying to dig a hole with your fingers after the shovel has been made, or walking to Phoenix when you can use a car."

When he began, though he was confident that what he was embarking on represented the future, Cope felt all the loneliness of the pioneer. Now, he suggests there is a growing interest in the possibilities. Not least the commercial ones. He was recently approached by a headline pop band he won't say which to see whether Emily could be persuaded to produce some hits. Though "recombining" elements of popular music is a court case in the making, there has, he suggests, not surprisingly been an enormous interest in creating music for ringtones and for games. "In the next 10 years," Cope says, "what I call algorithmic music will be a mainstay of our lives."

The perception that we might identify the particular musical combinations that stir our individual souls suggests many other potential applications. Until now online music stores have based recommendations for future purchases on what a customer has bought before, but Cope's kind of musical analysis suggests a more intimate understanding of our particular desert island discs might be possible. It was reported last month that separate teams of researchers at universities in San Diego and in S o Paulo are refining different ways of analysing musical genres and rhythms, to enable predictions of what we are likely to buy to be far more precise (see panel below).

If music can be reduced to formulae and equations, does it begin to undermine notions of what music might mean to us? Douglas Hofstadter, author of the key book on the fundamentals of cognition, G del, Escher, Bach, has long lectured on the implications of Cope's work in understanding how the mind and music works. "In 20 years of working in artificial intelligence," he says, he has encountered "nothing more thought-provoking than David Cope's experiments." Hofstadter has distilled his thoughts on Cope's work into a full-length lecture performed in rhyme that begins with a question that might prove fundamental to future understanding of composition:

Is music a craft
Or is it an art?
Does it come from mere training
or spring form the heart?
Did the tudes of Chopin
reveal his soul's mood?
Or was Fr d ric Chopin
Just some slick "pattern dude"?

Hofstadter is very fond of Cope's remark that "Good artists borrow, great artists steal," though he is troubled that some of the mysteries of the creative process might be lost along the way, and with them a part of our understanding of what it means to be human. Cope, for his part, retains all of his sense of wonder at the composers geniuses of recombination who have gone before. Does he still dream of creating a masterpiece? I wonder.

He says he has no idea what that word means.

Have Emmy and Emily at least short-circuited the angst and musical block that led him to create them in the first place?

"No," he says. "Not at all. I still get anxious and despairing. It never turns out as well as I hope it will. Every morning I wake up with the notion that I have failed at everything and I have to create some reason to exist." He and Emily then get back to work.

This car will give you driving ambitions

A small confession: I think BMWs are overrated. Actually, that's overstating the overrating. What I think is that the 3 Series is not the car that many seem to think it is, and sometimes I'm inclined to extrapolate from that about other BMWs, which is unfair.

It's particularly unfair in the case of the 5 Series. Whereas the 3 Series is just an executive saloon, the 5 Series is the executive executive saloon. The latest update, although not radically different, is such a consummate piece of managerial machinery that as soon as you clap eyes on it, you want to go out and get a senior-ranked job with ICI or Unilever. Or at least get a job as a driver, delivering senior executives from ICI and Unilever to vital business meetings and golf matches.

The interior all cream leather and comfort room (it's slightly longer than its predecessor) is perhaps the most attractive aspect of the car. From the outside, it's not stunning or sumptuous, nor will it trigger an instant craving in watching pedestrians. But it is handsome blandly handsome, perhaps, like some well-turned-out faceless European bureaucrat, yet substantial and sleek with it. Although there may well be no solution to the economic crisis in the eurozone, this is nonetheless the car in which you'd want to set out to find one.

Lacking a critical meeting, or indeed a noncritical one, I instead drove around aimlessly. Except you can't really drive around aimlessly in a BMW 5 Series, any more than you'd chill out in a suit on your day off. It simply packs too much punch and embodies too much sense of purpose to allow faffing around.

The acceleration, for a start, has a way of focusing the attention. Who'd have thought, even just a few years ago, that a diesel automatic could ever leave your stomach in the boot? Fortunately there's plenty of room there for your stomach and many other stomachs besides. It's the kind of car in which you want to receive an urgent phone call just so you can tell the driver, or indeed yourself, to step on it.

I found I got a lot more done in the day, driving around in the 530d SE, than I would otherwise. I'm talking about picking up the dry-cleaning, buying postage stamps and collecting a parcel from the sorting office.

In other words, it revolutionised my productivity, taking it to the kind of executive levels of activity that previously seemed unimaginable. A few more weeks and I would have mastered French, become a parent governor, moved into property speculation and perhaps even started opening my bank statements. I felt almost relieved when it was taken away.

BMW 530d SE

Price 37,100
Top speed 155mph
Acceleration 0-62mph 6.3 seconds
Average consumption 44.8mpg
CO2 emissions 166g/km
Eco rating 5.5/10
Bound for Canary Wharf
In a word Purposeful

The Flip range of camcorders puts 8GB of film time in your pocket. But where should you go to get the best price?

Video cameras have caught up with digital cameras when it comes to ease of use and reduced size, and the latest Flip range has taken amateur movie making by storm.

Fitting easily into your pocket or handbag and weighing only 170g, the miniature size does not impact on quality: the UltraHD range lets you shoot stunning 720p video that will look crisp and clear on your HDTV, even in low-light conditions.

There is a "flip out" USB arm that directly connects to your computer and instantly launches FlipShare. This software allows you to upload your footage instantly on to YouTube or MySpace. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface also offers organising, emailing and editing options covering everything from creating custom movies to sharing your favourite snapshots.

Below are the best prices available at the time of publishing for a black Flip Video Ultra High Definition Camcorder with 8GB Memory (RRP 159.99). It films approximately two hours of HD video, perfect to capture those great holiday moments. Readers who have found better deals should post the details below.

Online

Deltatronics is cheapest online charging 114.50 plus 4.50 postage, followed by Comet at 119.99 with free postage if you are prepared to wait around a week, otherwise postage varies between 5.82 and 7.78.

If your preference is for a white Flip camcorder then Amazon is charging 124.

In store

For those of you eager to take the camera away this weekend, then John Lewis is best priced at 149.95 with a two-year guarantee, followed by Argos at 152.39.

Cheaper alternative

If HD is not required and you are happy with 4GB of high-quality recording then the Flip Ultra (II) Camcorder at 89.99 plus postage from Misco.co.uk is a price-busting equivalent, or you could collect in store at Tesco (subject to availability) for 99.97.

Whichever version you choose make sure you register your Flip and enjoy 2 for 1 entry at some top UK attractions.

If you want to link the Flip to your television then buy an HDMI cable with a mini HDMI connector for 2.28.

There's a new layout, increased speed and plenty of new features to be found in the first beta of Firefox 4

The Mozilla Foundation has announced the first beta version of Firefox 4, the next generation of its cross-platform web browser.

Although there is some way to go until the final release, the beta is considered to be stable and safe enough for daily use.

Mozilla is aiming to engage up to 4 million users in an interactive process to shape the final release. Feedback opportunities are prominent in the user interface, with users encouraged to submit their thoughts to the developers.

The popular browser is undergoing many changes, both visible and under the hood. The Windows release has seen the most apparent refinements, with tabs moved above the address bar as well as a single Firefox button to replace the menu bar.

Universal changes include a Smart Location bar, updated add-ons manager, replacement of the bookmarks bar with a bookmarks button, support for high definition WebM video, extra privacy protection and crash protection against media plug ins.

For web developers, the main feature to embrace is the new HTML5 parser which has full support for drag and drop, audio, video, file handling, and in-line SVG and MathML support.

Taking the beta for a spin, one enhancement is immediately apparent the speed. Taking a leaf from the book of Chrome, the rendering of web pages is instantaneous and video sites such as YouTube load up in record time.

The beta does not include all the intended features of the final release the Mac and Linux releases have yet to adopt the new menu layout and the synchronisation and privacy controls features are yet to be seen. Mozilla claims that it is going to squeeze even more speed from the engine for the final release later in the year.

So, have you had a look at the Firefox 4 beta yet? If so, what do you think? Do you like it? Let us know below.

Jimmy Doherty tells us all about his life as a luddite who looks like a nerd

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
That's an easy one for me it's my iPhone. It allowes me to email and receive email wherever I am. You suddenly realise: how did I ever live without it? You can also listen to music with it and play games.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
This morning to have a look at these questions.

What additional features would you add if you could?
A lie detector would be quite good that would be awesome.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
Only if people stop lying. But the phone? I hope not, because it's one of the great design classics.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
There's always something new coming out. You buy something and then they launch a new, better model. They always get you hooked like that.

Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
Not really. The only thing I could think of is those hands-free kits. Very practical when you're driving, but I hate people walking down the street using them it looks like they're talking to themsevles, and it drives me nuts.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
Read the instructions, which I never do. Or ask the wife, who always does read the instructions.

Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
I'm a luddite who looks like a nerd. Or should that be the other way around?

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
I try not to buy expensive kit because I lose it or break it! But I suppose my tractor was quite expensive. I bought a new one and had it sprayed Barbie pink. I bought it for my wife, but she never uses it because I'm always on it.

Mac or PC, and why?
Probably PC, because all the Mac owners say they're no good. And Mac owners all seem a bit smug.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
I love buying books, because there's something tangible about books. DVDs I buy, but music I download. The last DVD I bought was Zombieland.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
As long as it came in a 4-by-4 verson, otherwise it would be useless on the farm.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
A litte personalised submarine, which would be perfect on holidays. Everyone should have one it beats snorkelling.

Watch Doherty's new BBC series, The Private Life of...

Tamara Brown helps dating agencies to match couples using an improbable method of establishing compatibility

Tamara Brown, 33, is a behavioural geneticist and entrepreneur. Her company, GenePartner, offers a service for dating agencies assessing biological compatibility on the basis of DNA. For $99, clients submit a saliva test and their DNA is analysed and matched against five potential partners based on genetic coding for immunity, an indicator of sexual attraction. Further matches cost $1 each. The system was inspired by a 1995 study by Professor Claus Wedekind at the University of Bern, in which women smelled T-shirts worn by different men and rated them for attractiveness. Wedekind found the women were most attracted to men whose DNA coding for HLA molecules, a key player in immunity, was most different from their own. GenePartner, which Brown runs from Zurich with a partner, Joelle Apter, has been operating for two years and the company has conducted 1,500 tests.

So smelling T-shirts is a good indicator of compatibility?

It boils down to biological match the evolutionary drive to produce children who have the best chance of survival. People choose a partner whose immune system complements their own. This has been well-proven in animals and Professor Wedekind wanted to prove the link in humans.

Can you explain the science behind that?

HLA, the human leukocyte antigen, is one of the main factors in the immune system. It is rare among genes in that it is polymorphic, which means there are many possible sequences, more than 1,000. HLAs operate like a lock-and-key system. Each HLA molecule is the lock and the key is a pathogen. The more HLAs you have, the more different pathogens it can bind and instructs the immune system accordingly. So choosing a partner with different HLAs produces a child with a much broader immunity.

How have you built on Professor Wedekind's research?

In his experiment, the women never met the men, merely expressed levels of attraction. We took it a step further by analysing established couples to see whether the theory holds whether successful couples have a significantly higher difference in HLA profiles. And we found that they do.

How nuanced can you be? Will certain HLA combinations lead to a different type of attraction or feeling for each other?

The basic rule is that if someone has very different HLAs, you will be more attracted to them. We found that you may be attracted to someone with similar HLAs but the nature of the attraction will be different. It is basically about whether you feel cosy with the other person or want to date them. Biologically, your family is your support and someone with similar HLAs is closer to your family.

Whereas with someone with different HLAs, you want to sleep with them...

Exactly. We are looking at the sexual part here.

But wouldn't people with passionate but difficult relationships behind them perhaps want a bit less chemistry? A more sensible match?

There is a sexual and a social part to a good match your personalities must be compatible too. However, the sexual part is really important, probably more important than people think because it keeps the relationship younger and more passionate. When you are in love in the beginning, you are a little bit blind and don't see your partner's faults. You don't care if he doesn't put the lavatory seat down. If the chemistry is right, you will stay in this mode for longer. That is what chemistry and passion do for you. Without them, you see things more and get annoyed.

Does this system ever make mistakes?

The contraceptive pill can skew things. What tends to happen when the woman is on the pill is that she chooses a partner more similar in HLA profile than you would expect. Then there can be problems later on when the woman comes off the oral contraceptive and the sexual attraction drops.

What would a report from you show in terms of predicting compatibility?

We give an overall result for biological compatibility, on a sliding scale from very bad to fantastic. We give a measure for levels of attraction. A measure of the type of interest whether this would be a passionate attraction or a more cosy one. We measure the symmetry of attraction whether you will be equally attracted to each other or one of you will be more attracted to the other. The majority of successful couples have good symmetry. Finally, we give the probability of a successful pregnancy.

You can predict fertility from a couple's HLA profiles?

There is published research to show that couples who are not biologically compatible are more likely to have a miscarriage in early pregnancy.

Did you use your system to meet your husband?

I met him online in 2001, when we didn't have the system, but we are a good match. I thought the internet was a great way to find a partner, but friends kept complaining about meeting men and not clicking. That gave me the idea for GenePartner: you can work out so much online, but not chemistry. My husband and I did the test later on and had 80% compatibility.

What a relief?!

I knew it would be OK. We have lots of established couples coming to us to do the test, but I think they know the answers already.

The speed race, at least. Books are faster and 'more relaxing' to read, but iPads and Kindles are 'more satisfying', finds new study

E-book readers might be heralded as the future of literature but a new report shows that it's still quicker to read the old-fashioned print version of a book.

The study, by Jakob Nielsen from the Nielsen Norman Group, gave 24 people a short story by Ernest Hemingway to read chosen because "his work is pleasant and engaging to read, and yet not so complicated that it would be above the heads of users".

Each participant read their story using four different devices a printed book, a PC, an iPad and a Kindle. While on average the stories took 17 minutes and 20 seconds to read, the Kindle experience was 10.7% slower than print, and the iPad was 6.2% slower.

The readers were also asked to rate their satisfaction of the four experiences on a one-to-seven scale: the iPad was top at 5.8, followed by the Kindle at 5.7 and the printed book at 5.6. The PC came in last, with "an abysmal 3.6".

"They disliked that the iPad was so heavy and that the Kindle featured less-crisp, grey-on-grey letters. People also disliked the lack of true pagination and preferred the way the iPad (actually, the iBook app) indicated the amount of text left in a chapter," said Nielsen. He added that "less predictable" comments included participants saying that the book was "more relaxing" to use than the electronic devices. "And they felt uncomfortable with the PC because it reminded them of work."

Wii/PS3/XBOX 360/PC/DS/PSP; 39.99- 44.99; cert 7+; Travellers Tales/Warner Bros Interactive

This is getting predictable. Travellers Tales comes along, take a successful movie franchise, turns it into a Lego-themed video game, I giggle my way through it like a six-year old, get obsessive about completing both the game and the vast array of side challenges and bonus content, finally get some sleep, persuade my wife not to divorce me, and then slap it with a five-star review.

The thing is though, the developers at Travellers Tales really know what they're doing. The Lego-based nostalgia oh the lovely, plasticky rumble when a character gets reduced to bricks! still packs considerable charm and the games are an interactive joy.

They're also tough as puzzlers go: expect a good few head-scratching moments (or searches for online walkthroughs) when, ahem, trying to get into the girls' toilet at Hogwarts (no, it's not like that, you've got a troll to defeat) and other similar challenges.

As the name suggests, the game covers Harry's first four years at Hogwarts, so you're guiding your scarred juvenile wizard (and an assortment of supporting players, from Ron to Hermione, and even Scabbers the rat) through the first four books. Rowling's work in these Philosopher's Stone, Chamber of Secrets, Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire actually lends itself quite well to the video game format. Harry et al have a mystery on their hands which needs solving. Hogwarts has a vast number of rooms that need exploring. And then up pops He Who Must Not Be Named in a variety of forms for the final showdown. This translates brilliantly to Lego's lovely format and gives a proper Boss-based finale to each year.

In the Star Wars and Indiana Jones games, different characters possessed different abilities and weaponry in order to complete the main game and its myriad puzzles and challenges. Once those characters and their skills are unlocked, you can then return to earlier levels, get into the areas you couldn't access before and complete all the extra challenges and bonus content.

The format is much the same here but, instead of just being able to play as the characters with the skills you need to complete the level Hagrid's strength, for example, or Madam Pomfrey's more powerful witchcraft over the course of the four years, Harry, Ron and Hermione will learn new spells, enabling deeper exploration of earlier levels. It's a neat touch, and rather like being back at school: you're that bit older, so you're now allowed in this room.

The learning curve, it almost goes without saying, is perfectly judged, the throwaway gags often sublime, and the adherence to the tales and spirit of Rowling's work is possibly even more faithful than the films. It might say 7+ on the box, but please tell me I'm not the only 40-something who thinks this is an utter joy?

Rating: 5/5

Twitter finally explains new EarlyBird promotional account to distribute exclusive offers to users

Despite reeling in $160m in venture capital funding and worth an estimated $1bn, Twitter is still on the hunt for sustainable revenue sources to support the company.

Early indications on Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets appear to have been successful, and are part of a larger strategy to avoid paid accounts yet gain financial security.

After what seems like a lifetime, the company has now officially announced EarlyBird, which aims to inform users of special promotions that are unique to Twitter and the account. Selected advertisers will pay to distribute offers to the thousands of users present on the network, although none of these has yet been named. The offers will be time sensitive, so fast action will be needed to catch that particular worm.

EarlyBird functions in the same way as a normal Twitter account for the offers to appear in your follow feed. Unlike Promoted Trends, however, they do not appear automatically on your front page and it is an opt-in service, as opposed to the opt-out follow that had been mooted. EarlyBird tweets can also be retweeted to pass them onto your followers.

What's the catch? Initially, EarlyBird offers will be US-centric, although Twitter has said this will likely change: "We're starting with US-wide offers but will explore location-based deals in the future."

The opportunity for EarlyBird to go viral is huge, with offers potentially spreading around like internet like wildfire if they are deemed worthy enough. As I type, the account has 9,545 followers, something that will need to multiply infinitely for the scheme to be successful. Thanks to the joys of trends and retweeting, this seems likely. Assuming the followers flood in, Twitter will be closer to long-term sustainability.

Analogue sets are no longer available in British shops. Here's a glimpse back through the history of the cathode ray tube

What exactly is a 'panic button'? I've written before that child safety and online behaviour is a far more nuanced problem than a single Batphone-style button could solve, but it's an image that still obscures the detail in the ongoing tussle between Facebook and Ceop, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre.

The solution announced today is not a panic button - it's an app. It is something every major brand has had, in the form of a page or an app, on Facebook for some time - but that public agencies don't have the marketing resources to come up with. This project took two months.


Photo by emilydickinsonridesabmx on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Facebook say the app combines its expertise on technology and marketing with Ceop's in online safety. This is not a 'reverse ferret' on the company's stance that a panic button is not an effective solution; it still holds that one button published on every page of the site will attract too many false reports and create too much work for Ceop. What it does do is give Ceop the chance to put its logo, which is recognised by most UK schoolchildren, on an official page and use the virality of Facebook to promote the service.

On the downside, because users have to actively add this app to their profiles to use it, the viral success of the app depends on how attractive it is. Though it will be helped by promotion in Facebook's ad spots over the next two years it will still be competing with Farmville, vibrating hamsters and quizzes about which member of Glee you most look like.

This is just one privacy-related issue Facebook is dealing with, alongside changes in its privacy terms that have triggered various protests and demands for a simplification of its privacy settings for users.

Clearly no-one has any truck with Ceop's mission, which is essential. But I can't help feeling that this move is overdue and that, in the bigger picture, Ceop needs a more sophisticated and youth-friendly campaign.

Though the name 'Ceop' is being promoted in schools, it's a terribly dull acronym and an unimaginative brand with little resonance that will miss the opportunity to engage a far larger audience. Think of the NSPCC's Full Stop campaign, the Department of Health's Change4Life or the brilliant anti-drug campaign Talk to Frank. Still, with 40% cuts I don't suppose we'll see that kind of imagination or impact from a government-run campaign for years.

Millions of us have no access to the internet. The UK's Digital Champion explains why that matters - and introduces the data that shows how
Get the data

Ten million of us in the UK have never used the internet.

Try to picture it: it's the equivalent of the entire populations of our five biggest cities combined - London, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow and Sheffield - all being left without the tool that we now heavily rely on every day.

Four million of those who are offline are society's most disadvantaged: 39% are over 65.38% are unemployed - 19% are adults in families with children.

Think about what that means. Thanks to technology's near-ubiquity and our close to universal use of it, we now live in a world defined by constant communication 40m adults in the UK use the web, and 30 million of us do so daily.

Worldwide, we send 55m tweets via Twitter a day. In the UK alone, 25m of us are on Facebook. 16m people watch TV or listen to the radio via the web. Millions of us now use sites like Meetup.com to get together offline in our local communities.

3.1m over-65s go more than a week without seeing a friend, family or neighbour and half of all internet users say the web increases contact with friends who live further away. Yet 6.4m over-65s have never used the internet, with 63% of them saying they 'see no reason' to get online.

21st century leisure and social interaction on and offline - increasingly rests on technology and it can be a powerful tool in combating social isolation in our ageing population.

90% of new jobs require computer skills. Seven million job adverts were placed online in the UK last year. Without web skills you're increasingly cut off from the labour market. Yet 270,000 of the 1.5m people claiming Jobseekers Allowance of 0.8bn a year are without these basic skills.

There is a wage premium for those with web skills, digital literacy is increasingly a basic requirement for employability, and internet access can unleash enterprise by letting people launch small businesses.

58% of us buy goods and services online in the UK and the average household saves 560 a year by shopping and paying bills online. To give over-65s the same amount that the average household saves from shopping and paying bills online via the State Pension would cost Government 6bn a year.

Remaining offline carries a penalty. Only 14% of people cite cost as a reason they don't get online and 41% of those completing a foundation computer course go on to get home access once the considerable benefits of online interaction becomes clear.

For reasons of social justice and economic necessity, we must act now.

In spite of the many benefits in getting online, 59% of non-internet users attribute their failure to go online to a lack of motivation, rising to 63% of those 65-74 and over.

Which is why we are calling on organisations in every sector and in every corner of the UK to join us to try to forge a stronger, networked UK in which millions more of us are online by the end of the Olympic year.

We are asking them to make pledges to inspire people to try the net, to encourage and reward people for going online, and to support those groups that might need a helping hand because they lack the skills, financial resource or because of disability.

We are calling on industry to advertise the benefits of connectivity rather than broadband speeds, to come up with compelling incentives and affordable, entry-level broadband starter packs, and for Government to play a key role in nudging the final 10million of us to go online by thinking internet first when it delivers public services. Nine out of ten people who are offline know someone who is online we just need to join up our skills so that if a fraction of those 40m people got out there and passed them on to a friend or family member, we would we forge a very much stronger networked UK by the Olympic year. Make your pledge here.

raceonline2012

In June, Martha Lane Fox was appointed by The Prime Minister as the UK Digital Champion. She co-founded lastminute.com and the private karaoke chain Lucky Voice. In 2007, she launched Antigone, a grant-giving foundation that supports education, health and criminal justice charities to reflect her commitment to social justice. She is non-executive director at Marks & Spencer plc, Channel 4 Television and Mydeco

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Google, which has a 30% market share of Chinese search traffic, given renewal despite recent strained relations

China has renewed Google's licence to operate in the country, the search giant announced today.

Writing on the company blog, chief legal officer David Drummond said: "We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China."

Google which has a 30% market share of Chinese search traffic recently began directing Google.cn visitors to its uncensored Hong Kong site, saying the new approach ensured it stayed true to a commitment not to censor searches from internet users in China.

Relations with authorities in China have been strained since Google said it no longer wanted to cooperate with government internet censorship. The announcement was prompted by cyber attacks the company traced to China.

Google stunned markets and consumers in January when it warned it might quit the country, saying it would not provide the censored search results that China requires.

However, the Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said yesterday the company was confident of being granted an ICP licence extension.

Google is due to report its second-quarter financial results next week. Google's search business in China accounts for a tiny slice of the company's 15.82bn in annual revenue. Analysts' estimates of Google's annual revenues in China range from $300m to $600m, but long-term growth prospects are key.

There was no immediate word from China's Information Ministry about the renewal.

Giffgaff has rewarded its customers with their first payout for acting as its sales and technical staff

A new "community-run" mobile phone company, which is offering the chance to earn hundreds of pounds a year by spreading the word about it, has announced its first payments to customers.

One Giffgaff user received 654, and more than 40 others earned at least 200 apiece. Payouts are earned by recruiting and by helping other customers with their technical problems.

Giffgaff, which went live in November as a "sim-only" service (you use your existing handset), is the latest example of a web-based business that gives people the opportunity to make money by, in effect, becoming a salesperson or troubleshooter. The scheme therefore allows the company to save on advertising and call centre costs.

Who's behind the company?

Giffgaff an ancient Scottish word that means "mutual giving", apparently describes itself as a mobile phone company "where the community is at the heart of it", and which does things differently to the "faceless" big networks. It is online only, with "no wasteful shops or excessive call centres".

So some might be surprised to discover Giffgaff is wholly owned by 0₂ and runs on its network.

While some potential customers might be disappointed that this isn't a truly mutual, member-owned organisation, others may feel more comfortable signing up with a company backed by a big name.

Mike Fairman, the chief executive, says that while 0₂ provided the capital for the business to start up, Giffgaff operates independently, with its own offices and staff. "It's very much an arms-length arrangement this is very different from 0₂."

The company declined to divulge its customer numbers, but says it has a 6,000-strong online community.

Is it worth signing up as a customer?

If you are looking for a cheap pay-as-you-go service, Giffgaff's pricing is quite competitive. UK calls are 8p and texts 4p this matches Asda Mobile's pricing with free UK web browsing on your handset until 1 October. After that, mobile internet will be charged at up to 50p a day for most people, says a spokesman. Customers can get free calls to one another.

As the company points out on its website, 0₂ charges 25p for calls to other networks and 10p for texts.

It is offering a range of "goodybags" a mix of UK minutes, texts and mobile internet that last for a month.

You can order a free sim card online and top up by card or voucher.

What about those payments to customers?

Promoting the company and helping out other customers in Giffgaff's online forum earns rewards. Promoting the company could include giving sim cards to friends or even making your own video and putting it on YouTube.

One point equals one pence. Sending your friend an email about Giffgaff would earn you 50p. If you send Giffgaff sims to several people, you get 5 for each one that is activated.

The rewards for helping with customer queries vary depending on criteria, such as how the person who asked the question rated the answer.

How is the money paid?

The points earned are converted into pounds, and the cash paid out twice a year in June and December. You can have the cash paid into a PayPal account (you can't have it paid direct into your bank account), get it as airtime credit for your phone, or donate it to Cancer Research, the charity chosen by members.

How much can people make?

Giffgaff claims the amounts people can earn are "limitless". It says more than 40% of members were rewarded last month. The average user received 14, while 42 people earned more than 200.

One 19-year-old Londoner received 206 for spreading the word among his friends and helping on the community forum. He is putting the cash towards a new laptop for when he starts university in September.

Liam Salomone (pictured), 30, of Northolt, Middlesex, earned 654 for sending emails to contacts, answering queries on the forum, and encouraging friends to sign up.

"It's much better that a mobile firm pays its customers to market their product than to waste money on advertising," he says, adding: "I'm saving the money for a trip to South Africa with my mum. We've both spoken about visiting there for years, and now we have an opportunity to do it."

Does anyone else do this sort of thing?

Mobile network 3 runs the "Free Agent" scheme, where 5 is paid into your PayPal account every time a friend with a 3G phone orders a sim from you and tops it up by 10 or more.

You don't have to be a 3 customer to sign up to the scheme, and the company is offering a number of online tools to help people promote the offer.

Education equipment company Promethean has backed a landspeed attempt that aims to hit 1,000mph

Education equipment company Promethean, which floated in March and entered the FTSE 250 last month, is backing a British attempt to smash the world landspeed record.

The Bloodhound supersonic car (SSC) team, led by former land speed record holder Richard Noble, hopes to break through the 1,000mph barrier. That would see it smash the current land speed record of 763mph, which was set in 1997 by former RAF pilot Andy Green, who will also pilot Bloodhound. The attempt on the record will be made in South Africa next year.

The car, which will have two engines and a rocket, currently only exists as a model within a bank of computers that are more powerful than those used by the Met Office for weather predictions. It has gone through numerous redesigns but the team believe that with the current configuration its tenth they have cracked it.

The car's Eurofighter Typhoon jet engine and its rocket should deliver the same power as 180 Formula One cars. A second engine is needed to ensure that the rocket gets enough fuel. A mock-up will be unveiled at the Farnborough Air show next week.

But the 15m project is not just about fast cars, it is also about inspiring the next generation of engineers and is being used to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics to children in more than 3,700 schools worldwide.

Promethean, the world's second largest maker of educational whiteboards, has become the project's official interactive education technology partner, supplying classroom equipment as well as equipping the legion of volunteer "Bloodhound Ambassadors" who are visiting schools and colleges as part of the programme. It will also put a wealth of educational materials on Promethean Planet, the world's largest teaching website. It has over 650,000 members in over 150 countries.

Neither Noble nor Green are strangers to record breaking. Green set the current landspeed record with ThrustSSC at Black Rock Desert, Nevada while Noble was behind the original Thrust2 programme which brought the world landspeed record back to Britain in 1983.

As well as holding the current land speed record, Bloodhound SSC's driver Green was also involved in the JCB DIESELMAX project, which aimed to find out how fast a pair of digger engines in close formation could travel. Green clocked up 350mph.

Despite improved quality and more content, streaming television has yet to make it out of the study

In a bid to introduce it's content to a wider audience, YouTube has launched two new services to deliver video straight into the hands of viewers in the form of Leanback and the new YouTube Mobile site.

Following from the announcement of Google TV back in May, the launches from the internet's favourite video site come as no surprise. But where did we begin?

With the launch of YouTube in 2005, the video streaming phenomenon truly began and, for the first time, users could view clips of skateboarding dogs or cats falling about without the hassle of installing third party applications. Internet providers baulked at the increased strain on their capacity and rapidly started expanding their bandwidth to cope.

The launch of the BBC's iPlayer in 2007 upped the ante again, providing full length television shows any time of the day. Despite shows only being available for seven days after broadcasting, the service has been a tremendous success, with the BBC reporting more than 18 million users streaming videos each week.

The caveat is that you have to sit in front of your computer. Instead of lounging on the sofa to gaze at your 42in plasma screen, internet streaming entails perching in front of a considerably smaller screen, inevitably producing an inferior experience.

However, the push out of the study and into the living room has already begun iPlayer is available on many games consoles as well as numerous digital TV set-top boxes, of which the implementation works rather well. The golden magic box we are waiting for streaming music from Spotify and streaming television from YouTube and iPlayer has yet to appear.

The little-known Apple TV and SlingCatcher devices give us a glimpse at how these eventual devices may work.

Who wins out of the providers having new mediums to pump out content? The consumer of course. Instead of sitting through adverts and hours of irrelevant programming, on-demand television provides what you want, when you want.

The barrier of the personal computer still exists and the jump needs to be made for streaming to become a mainstream technology. Do you think online television streaming will reach the mainstream mindset any time soon? Will it rival the content of the main television channels?

ScreenReach co-founder Paul Rawlings says the Difference Engine was the most rewarding experience of his life

Reflecting on 91 days holed-up in an intense business hub in the North East, entrepreneur Paul Rawlings exhales heavily. "It was the most rewarding experience of my life. Seriously, I can't emphasise it enough," said the ScreenReach co-founder.

Rawlings' feet have barely touched the ground for the past three months. Along with entrepreneurs from eight other fledgling companies, he has just completed the first 13-week programme of new start-up incubator The Difference Engine.

"When we started The Difference Engine we started with a technology which we had high hopes for," Rawlings says. "Being part of the Engine has really helped us focus our technology into a series of products, given us access to some of the North East's finest mentors, and given us the confidence to sit in front of global businesses and tell them why they should be using ScreenReach."

Using Reach XML code, ScreenReach offers an "audience engagement technology", ripe for content companies and retailers to interact with their customers. Having secured 250,000 first-round investment through the programme, Rawlings and fellow co-founder Chris Farrell are in talks with big-name potential clients with partnerships expected to go live in the next two weeks.

As well as the access to mentors, initial funding of 20,000 (in return for 8% of future stock) and being surrounded by like-minded digital upstarts, Rawlings said being squirreled away in Middlesbrough away from the hustle-and-bustle of London helped focus attention on the product. The importance of this can be understated, says Jon Bradford, who originated the idea of The Difference Engine two years ago, eventually launching the first programme in December last year.

"There are significant advantages of being outside London," Bradford says as he catches a breather inbetween catching trains and aeroplanes marketing the Engine. "One of the key elements of being up north is for them to concentrate on their start-ups for a short period of time. We make sure we have all the right people for the right companies so there's no distractions.

"You have to have the right people to do the programme. Most good small businesses start and work up to 25 people then start fragmenting that's why we only have around 10 teams, to create a more cooperative atmosphere."

Bradford says that he actively encourages people to launch similar incubator setups around the UK. "The model we've adopted is similar to TechStars in the US, that kind of open-source spirit to help build an ecosystem of mentorship.

"That's the hard part of Europe," he says. "Culturally, we're people who are not warm and friendy, we're quite reserved people. When we get over that and not feel there's something in it for us, I think we genuinely can compete with the Americans."

The Difference Engine are now accepting applications for the second programme, based in Sunderland and starting on September 20. A shortlist of around 25 start-ups will be whittled down to around 10 who will complete the 13-week programme ending on December 17.

UK-based Difference Engine early alumni

CANDDi
In it's own words, CANDDi "turns anonymous aggregated analytics into a rich list of targeted individuals". The team threw away their software two weeks before the end of the Difference Engine programme and started from scratch, having realised that it wasn't what people wanted!

Curated.by
Curated.by is a curation platform for the real-time web. The crowd are given the tools to create handpicked streams of updated, tagged and categorised content. Similar to Wikipedia, users sort the best content into bundles of information to be shared and consumed by other people. Curated.by currently supports Twitter, with additional social networks and microblogging services coming soon.

Recite
Recite says it allows any website to become more accessible to people who are dyslexic, visually impaired or who have a "young reading age." By intercepting the webpage content, Recite instantly adds and outputs accessibility features such as voice, high contrast text, and alternate word options.

Rock Control
Rock Control encourages the public to launch and manage a band from scratch. From deciding the final line-up, "the public" will decide the look and feel of the band and manage their PR. Ultimately, one song will be created and simultaneously released into every chart around the world with the intention of gaining a global number one slot.

ScreenReach
ScreenReach is pitched as "the next generation in presentation and interaction technology," allowing real-time delivery of media content to a smartphone via any digital display (TV, outdoor advertising, PC, kiosk etc). Service providers - such as museums, broadcasters, fashion retailers - can engage and interact with customers instantly and reward them for interacting with their content. Secured 250,000 first round funding.

Tagorize
The Tagorize system apparently describes online information so accurately that it can provide a level of search relevancy that is more valuable and accurate than existing systems. Using the Tagorize indexing system substantially increases search accuracy and relevancy, leading to higher search conversion rates. Tagorize is the most natural and flexible way to store and retrieve data of large, unstructured datasets.

Wishlist
wishli.st is a Facebook application that helps people give gifts. Users can create a list of the people they buy presents for and invite them to create wishlists. Then they receive email reminders before birthdays and buy them things they want.

Not since the heady days of the 1990s has an internet IPO caused such excitement or controversy

Ocado's audacious plan for a 1bn stock exchange listing is generating the kind of hoopla in the City not seen since the dotcom boom, when ponytailed graduates burned through investors' cash quicker than you could dial up the information superhighway.

Ten years on, the internet has changed shoppers' habits forever but a debate still rages over whether the future of retail lies in "bricks" or "clicks". Investors want to know if Ocado is the new Amazon, which after 15 years has sales of 16bn and is selling everything from books to bikes. Or is it Buy.com, the electronics retailer whose UK business was swallowed up by John Lewis in 2001 and used as the basis for its own, now very successful, website?

"You have to be aware that the way you make money online is completely different to the physical store model," explains Michael Ross, the internet entrepreneur who started lingerie website Figleaves. His experience is bittersweet: Figleaves was sold last month to home shopping group N Brown for a modest 11.5m, having lost its competitive advantage as the big chains followed it onto the internet. "In 2002 we had 90% of the online lingerie market," he says. "By 2005 M&S, John Lewis and Debenhams were all in there."

Ross, who now runs technology business eCommera, thinks the future for retail is a "mixed economy" the "click and connect" model pioneered by the likes of Argos, where customers can employ a number of methods to make purchases, including the time-honoured one of going into a shop.

Over the last decade many e-commerce taboos, such as selling clothes online, have fallen: internet fashion store Asos has defied the doomsayers who remembered how one-time internet sensation Boo.com ended in tears and who thought women would never buy their outfit for Saturday night from their desk at lunchtime.

Indeed, Asos's chief executive Nick Robertson is targeting sales of 1bn and is in talks with Boots the Chemists over letting customers pick up Asos parcels in their local pharmacy.

But the debate fuelled by Ocado's bold charge for the London Stock Exchange is whether being an internet-only retailer is a blessing or curse. Most people take the middle ground offered by multi-channel retailing, as although some 70% of purchases start online, it turns out shoppers still need somewhere to go even if it is just to pick up something they paid for on their home computer the night before.

Last week, Marks & Spencer said its home shopping sales rose 49% in recent months on last year. But the consensus is that, after several years of breathtaking growth, online sales have started to slow. Analysts are becoming divided as to the extent to which the internet can penetrate the psyche of a nation of shopkeepers. Robert Clark, the director of consultancy Retail Knowledge Bank, thinks the internet will eventually account for some 15% of the UK's 275bn retail sector at present some 10bn is spent online. "Clearly internet sales will continue to increase, but it is not taking over the world in the way some had predicted," he says.

Last week Amazon surprised analysts by launching a groceries service in the UK selling 22,000 products. Amazon does not disclose overall UK sales, but Clark puts them in the region of 1.1bn at the last count. He suggests the company's relentless march into new sectors smacks of desperation as growth in its core area of books, CDs and DVDs dissipates: "There is an element of maturity in their core markets book sales aren't going barmy."

Even if Amazon is spreading itself thin these days, few would deny that it has changed UK retail forever. Some believe Ocado has the potential to do the same for the grocery market as its sales roll up at 20% a year and its customer base approaches a quarter of a million. There is no question that there is a substantial market for it to attack some think food shopping will eventually be the biggest online retail sector but estimates as to the exact size vary. Market research firm IGD predicts internet grocery sales will almost double to 7.2bn by 2014.

Some City scribes argue that, ironically perhaps, Ocado's biggest problem is not having existing store network to spread the cost of a low-margin and labour-intensive enterprise. Its biggest rivals on the web Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda all pick internet orders off their own supermarkets' shelves. Ocado, by comparison, has invested hundreds of millions of pounds in one state-of-the-art warehouse in Hatfield and estimates that a second one, planned for the Midlands, will cost 210m to build.

Analysts point to the fact that Tesco.com was a profitable enterprise in its own right by the time sales got to the 400m level Ocado has reached today; Ocado, by contrast, has yet to make a profit. Analysts at stockbroker Collins Stewart say one of the difficulties investors have is finding a comparable company to benchmark it against. Amazon, US online movie rental service Netflix and Asos have all been suggested, but the analysts thinks Ocado is more "complex" and cash-hungry. Of the 200m it plans to raise in new shares at this month's IPO, 80m will be used to improve the Hatfield warehouse.

After meeting potential European investors last week, Ocado's directors are now heading to the US, banging the drum for what would be the biggest float London has seen this year. The company was started by three former Goldman Sachs bankers, Jason Gissing, Tim Steiner and Jonathan Faiman, and their undoubted ability to attract high-profile investors is a testament to their presentational skills.

But the internet has created both kings and paupers, with success in the end often coming down to the entrepreneurial talents of founders such as Amazon's Jeff Bezos.

"A lot of it is about the quality of the execution," says Ross. "Amazon's was flawless, while at Boo which was an idea ahead of its time it was poor. Ocado has done an enormous amount of things extremely well. The only thing they have failed to do so far is make money."

Online hits and misses

Asos

Pitch: Celebrity-inspired fashion

Founders: Nick Robertson, who still runs it, and Quentin Griffiths

History: Started life as Entertainment Marketing, which aimed to get brands featured in films and television shows and then sell them online "as seen on screen". Clothing sales took off and it was later renamed Asos. It floated on Aim in 2000 and has gone from strength to strength. It has a market value of 650m and recently set a sales target of 1bn. Hit

Adili

Pitch: The green Asos. "Adili" is the Swahili word for "ethical"

Founders: Former Dixons executive Adam Smith and Quentin Griffiths. Other investors included Jersey-based entrepreneur Bob Morton and Peter Davies, the multimillionaire former boss of Warehouse.

History: Started in 2006 and floated on Aim the following year. Sales initially took off as upmarket brands such as Edun, started by Bono's wife Ali Hewson, won plaudits in the fashion press. But the business was hit hard by the credit crunch, and changed its name to Ascension, because shoppers were confusing it with German discounter Aldi. After going back to shareholders several times for more money, the shares were suspended in February and it was bought by entrepreneur Luke Heron for 1. Miss

Ocado

Pitch: Waitrose, but without all of the stores

Founders: former Goldman Sachs bankers Jason Gissing, Jonathan Faiman and Tim Steiner

History: Started in 2000 but the company did not make it first grocery delivery until two years later. It operates from a hi-tech warehouse in Hatfield, which is supposedly superior to running the vast store networks built by rivals. In eight years of delivering groceries it has never made a profit but it has 240,000 customers and annual sales of more than 400m. It plans to list on the stock exchange and its directors think it is worth up to 1.37bn. Hit?

Webvan

Pitch: an earlier, Californian version of Ocado

Founder: Louis Borders, who also co-founded the bookseller Borders. Other investors included Goldman Sachs and Yahoo.

History: Its 1999 IPO raised some $400m and at its zenith the service reached 10 US cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago. Customers liked it for its pledge to deliver within a 30-minute time slot, but investors were less impressed. The company burned through $1bn in 18 months, earning it a place in the dotcom hall of infamy. It filed for bankruptcy in 2001 and lives on only in name: the brand is owned by Amazon. Miss

Local authorities are about to release a real tsunami of data - but campaigners are already worried it could be going wrong. How useful will it really be?

We all thought Coins was going to be the government's promised "tsunami of data", but the real data storm is going to come when local government (under Downing Street duress) will release every spending item over 500.

This should be a moment to celebrate, for developers, journalists and everyone concerned with how councils spend our council tax. Instead, campaigners are united in anxiety that what we might get could just be more of the same.

And it all started so well. Local government secretary Eric Pickles told councils that:

"I don't expect everyone to get it right first time, but I do expect everyone to do it".

Well getting it wrong might be the default position for some local authorities. CountCulture's Chris Taggart is concerned about data company Spikes Cavell's SpotlightOnSpend muscling in on local government data (you can see his latest post on the issue here).

The upshot seems to be this, councils hand over all their valuable financial data to a company which aggregates for its own purposes, and, er, doesn't open up the data, shooting down all those goals of mashing up the data, using the community to analyse and undermining much of the good work that's been done.

Paul Bradshaw reports that a Help Me Investigate page has been set up over the issue, to see how widespread it really is.

Spikes Cavell has been stung by the furore - chief executive Luke Spikes has pledged to allow raw data downloads, according to Information Age.

As it is, there is a real fear that councils could get it clangingly wrong. Openlylocal's data scoreboard shows that only 15 out of 434 local councils are publishing open data at the moment - only seven of them in a truly open format.

There seems to be a panic up and down the country among councils suddenly faced with releasing data they've previously kept to themselves - presumably combined with beffudlement over why they have to do it at all. If that panic translates into a default position of outsourcing the task, then we have real problems.

The thing is, there are no shortage of official guidelines showing exactly how to release the data. The Local Data Panel has a concise and clear set of principles for local data release - worth reading for their clarity alone. The Open Knowledge Foundation does too.

Essentially, they boil down to some pretty simple ideas:

1. Make it open

No T&Cs about not using the data for commercial use, no restrictions on access. Make the data available to anyone to do whatever they want to with it. That's the only way that the data information revolution is going to work.

2. Make it readable for computers

The data needs to be in a format that any computer can use - no more PDFs, thank you very much. If developers can't build applications and campaigners can't analyse it, what use is it?

3. Make it granular

The days when we only wanted official statisticians to just put the numbers together in a way we could understand are gone. Now we also want the full, disaggregated data too. It's the only way it will ever be useful for someone wanting to gather the true local picture of local spending. Let us worry about whether the dataset is too big or not. It's not your problem anymore.

4. Make it quick

Just get the stuff out there. We'd rather have it as it is - and then get it revised later than have to wait months for it to be finalised. The government has provided express permission for local authorities to do this. So just do it.

5. Make it easy to find

There's no point hiding this stuff away. If we can't find it, it may as well not exist. It should be easy to discover and simple to access.

That's a manifesto we can sign up to. What do you think?

Can you do something with our data?

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Internal memo said Twitter tribute to Hezbollah's spiritual leader had compromised senior Middle East editor's credibility

Twitter, with its strict 140-character limit, was never going to be the best medium to make a nuanced point about Middle East politics. But Octavia Nasr gave it a go.

The cost was great: Nasr was fired as CNN's senior Middle East editor after 20 years with the US-based news channel.

The offending tweet was sent on Sunday morning following the death in Beirut of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who was instrumental in the establishment of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Using her official CNN Twitter account Nasr wrote: "Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot."

The tweet was immediately picked up by supporters of Israel, to which the Islamist group is bitterly opposed. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in the US released a statement demanding Nasr "apologise to all victims of Hezbollah terrorism whose loved ones don't share her sadness over the passing of one of Hezbollah's giants".

The text was swiftly removed from her Twitter feed, but by then it had been heavily circulated, with criticism mounting.

Nasr responded on Tuesday with a blog on the CNN website, calling her initial message "simplistic" and "an error of judgment". Her respect for the ayatollah, who she had interviewed for Lebanese television in 1990, was owing to his stance on women's rights, notably his demands that "honour killings" stop, she explained.

But this was not enough. The next day, Nasr was reportedly called in to see her bosses at CNN's headquarters in Atlanta. The New York Times quoted an internal memo from a senior vice-president, Parisa Khosravi, which said: "We have decided that [Nasr] will be leaving the company."

The memo added: "At this point, we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward."

The company has not confirmed the news, saying only that the tweet "did not meet CNN's editorial standards". A spokesman added: "This is a serious matter and will be dealt with accordingly." Nasr's Twitter account has fallen silent.

Fadlallah, 74, was Hezbollah's spiritual leader when it formed after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, though he later distanced himself from the group's ties with Iran.

Nasr, who appeared on camera and worked behind the scenes at the TV station, soon realised her mistake, writing on her blog: "Reaction to my tweet was immediate, overwhelming and provides a good lesson on why 140 characters should not be used to comment on controversial or sensitive issues, especially those dealing with the Middle East."

While her tweet attracted controversy, a tribute to Fadlallah came from another seemingly unlikely source: the UK ambassador to Beriut.

Frances Guy, who has headed the mission since 2006, wrote on her official Foreign Office blog: "Lebanon is a lesser place the world needs more men like him, willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints. May he rest in peace."

Comments beneath the post were mainly positive, although one read: "Her esteemed predecessors, such as Sir John Gray, lived in mortal fear of being blown up by Fadlallah's Hezbollah hoods. So much for the 'admired Shia leader' she refers to above."

Nasr is one of the more high-profile victims of a phenomenon known as "twittercide". A notable UK casualty was Stuart MacLennan, a Scottish Labour candidate deselected a month before the election for using Twitter to call old people "coffin dodgers" and David Cameron "a twat".

Last month an Irish exam supervisor was dismissed after using his phone to tweet: "I do pity the girls that have me supervising, im young, handsome & probably very distracting ha ha". Meanwhile a columnist for Australia's Age newspaper lost her job after tweeting her wish that an 11-year-old child TV star "gets laid".

Chris Green's wife wants a light laptop suitable for business travel, but she also wants to run the Civilization IV and V games

My wife travels a lot for work, and would like as small a laptop as possible that is capable of running Civilization IV comfortably and hopefully Civ V when it comes out.
Chris Green

Gaming laptops need lots of power so they tend not to be very portable. Usually they will have a 17in or similar large screen, a separate graphics card, and perhaps even a quad-core processor. Portable business laptops are at the other end of the scale. Usually they have 13.3in or smaller screens, Intel integrated graphics chips, and nowadays may well use slow but power-efficient Intel CULV (Consumer Ultra Low Voltage) processors.

Civilization IV is a relatively old game and certainly ought to run on a modern thin-and-light CULV portable, but I suspect it would not be comfortable. I'd look for something with at least a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo chip and a separate graphics card.

There can't be many lightweight laptops that fill the bill, and the one that springs to mind is the Acer Timeline 3810TG running Microsoft Windows 7. This has an Intel Core 2 Duo (SU9400) processor and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 graphics card with 512MB of dedicated memory. It is thin and light (1.4kg) and Acer claims a 9-hour battery life, so it is certainly suitable for a business traveller. It ought to be good enough for mid-range games, the drawback being the processor speed: it's only 1.4GHz.

I looked at a CULV version of the Acer Timeline 3810T for Technophile, and was impressed by its quality. You can now get a 3810TG for about 600. However, I'd worry about the SU9400 running Civ IV, because it's a processor-intensive game. If any readers have tried it, please let us know.

At this point, however, I'd go for one of this year's new processors such as an Intel Core i3, i5, or i7. The i3 is the cheap entry-level version while the i7 offers the highest performance at too high a price. For gaming, the Core i5 would be a good compromise.

The new range of Core chips has an improved version of Intel Integrated Graphics on the processor. The new Intel HD Graphics system is DX10-compatible and seems as good as or better than the sort of mobility graphics cards fitted to laptops. Any Core i5 laptop should handle Civ IV comfortably, and might handle Civ V. Fortunately, HD Graphics is switchable, which means the Core processor will also exploit a separate graphics card if one is available.

Sticking with the Acer Timeline range, the Timeline X 3820TG has a 2.26GHz Core i5 processor with HD Graphics and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 graphics card with 512MB of memory, so it should be able to handle most games. The specification includes a 4GB of memory, a 650GB hard drive and Windows 7 Home Premium. Acer is still claiming up to 12 hours battery life. Of course, it's a bit heavier at 1.8kg, and more expensive, but you can find models discounted to 770 - 780.

Both the Acer machines mentioned above have 13.3in screens. If you shop around, there are Timelines with 11.6in, 14in and 15.6in screens and different processors at prices from about 300 to 1,000. There are also a few Sony models such as the Vaio VPCZ12M9EB with a Core i5 and Nvidia GeForce GT 330M graphics, but that costs 1,700 to 1,800.

Civilization V is scheduled for its UK release on 24 September, and we don't know what sort of specification will be needed to run it. It's hard to guess because there are some dramatic changes from Civ 4, such as from squares to hexagons. (GameSpot published an interview with the lead designer, Jon Shafer.)

But Civ has never targeted high end PCs, so I expect Civ 5 will run in Windows XP with 2GB of memory, a Core 2 Duo processor and DX9c graphics. If it actually needs a next-generation PC with Vista or Windows 7 and DX11 graphics, that would greatly restrict its potential market. I would therefore predict that a Core i3/i5/i7 with 3GB or 4GB of memory and integrated DX10-compatible HD Graphics will be able to run Civ 5. However, it would be safer to wait until the recommended specification is published at civilization5.com and then, for "comfortably", try to double it.

Apple iPhone 4 - good for Apple, bad for Apple PR, bad for mobile operators, good for HTML5 developers. And the customers? Well they're not exactly fully paid-up members of the Apple fan club either, according to a new report on the mobile web.


Photo by Sroown on Flickr. Some rights reserved

The unique selling point of the iPhone - it's App Store - will dwindle in appeal within two years as HTML5 becomes the standard for browsers and mobile web applications become increasingly feature-rich, says the 2010 Mobile Web Usage Forecast by mobile internet firm Volantis. And it will be gaming and social networking that provide the biggest pull towards the mobile web, the YouGov poll of over 4,000 US and UK consumers aged 18+ found.

Fifty-five percent of UK-based respondents said social networking would encourage them to use the mobile web more, while 17% were keen to access games on their mobiles. Those findings certainly correlate with this year's GSMA Mobile Media Metrics report which found that Facebook accounted for almost half of the 4.8bn minutes UK folk spent browsing the mobile web in December 2009. Over a third (38%) of all respondents felt that an iPhone was inconsequential as part of having a good mobile web experience, with just one in ten Americans thinking that an iPhone was essential to enjoy the mobile internet.

Volantis chief executive Mark Watson said the findings were good news for developers turned off by Apple's more restrictive approach to mobile apps: "The arrival of HTML5 will release developers from the constraints of Flash, making the user experience more varied and allowing the development of entertainment, lifestyle and business apps which are optimised to provide the same experience across all devices. Freeing developers from having to focus on either 'Apple' or 'Other' applications will further drive the mobile web market.

"Mobile internet users want compelling web experiences that will allow them quick and seamless access to the services that matter to them most," he said. "With the advancement of HTML5 the limitations of web apps for mobile are declining; inch by inch, function by function, handsets are becoming more web accessible."

In January this year, Gartner predicted mobile app downloads would surpass 21.6bn by 2013. By the same year, the analyst said, mobile phones would replace PCs as the most common device for web access.

An unrelated report by Denmark-based Strand Consult say Apple's latest mobile offering is "really bad news" for carriers, warning that mobile operators could well be issuing profit warnings due to large subsidies for the iPhone 4. Invoking its almost countercultural September 2009 report, The Moment of Truth - a Portrait of the iPhone, Strand Consult argue that any evaluation of iPhone 4 success should be based on six parameters:

How does the iPhone 4 differ compared to previous iPhone models?

Does the iPhone 4 have a new form factor that makes it attractive to new customer segments that did not purchase previous iPhone models due to the design?

Which customers will primarily purchase the new iPhone 4, new customers or existing iPhone customers that want the new model?

How will a massive upgrade of the iPhone base influence the economy of operators that have large customer bases that want a new subsidised iPhone 4?

What will happen with all the old iPhones when people purchase a new iPhone 4? Will they destroy them, or will they try to sell them to friends and family?

How big is the iPhone market? Is it so big that it deserves the uncritical attention it is receiving?

On each of these scores, Strand Consult contends, the iPhone 4 leaves much to be desired from mobile operators, while leaving the door open for mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) to deal in SIM-only strategies.

Temporary halt put on newly-introduced API feed as implementations catch the London open data experiment unprepared for demand

Stop all the tubes, cut off the API. Transport for London has had to stop its supply of data about the movements of Underground trains due to "overwhelming demand" from demonstrations of what can be done with that data such as Harry Metcalfe's Matthew Somerville's maths-and-magic live tube map. (If you try to go to that site now it just hangs.)

The reason: after opening up the API, requests for data ballooned from 180,000 to 10m. Consequently, TfL found itself a bit underprepared.

As the London Datastore - which has been the throughway for those API requests - notes,

"Owing to overwhelming demand by apps that use the service, the London Underground feed has had to be temporarily suspended. We hope to restore the service as soon as possible but this may take some days. We will keep everyone informed of progress towards a resolution."

Our understanding is that the London Datastore is now encouraging TfL to serve API requests directly, rather than proxied through the data store, because that will mean that TfL gets a clearer idea of who the customers and developers for its data actually are, and where they're based.

In the comments to the blogpost, there are some useful suggestions for TfL about how to improve the service while easing the strain on its (well, the LDS's) servers: more partitioning of feeds with less data per feed, and more caching. Obvious to developers - not so obvious to an organisation which has lived its life functioning, as one developer described it to me, as "a black box that people pour money into and which then spits out travel".

But for TfL, the lesson is clear: there's real, eager demand for its data via an API. There are people who have positive, helpful suggestions for how to improve its servicing. And it's being advised to hold those customers/developers closer, rather than at arm's length. It's going to be interesting to see how it progresses.

Now, can we have the live tube map back please? Soon?

Nick Clegg's 'Your Freedom' project basically a bonfire of the inanities should start on the act passed in the wash-up, especially given the example of Finland

Finns now have the legal right to broadband access, as a law passed in October comes into force today. Under the law, telecomms providers are obliged to offer always-on high-speed internet connections to all of the country's 5.3 million citizens, with a minimum speed of at least 1 megabit per second.

It makes an interesting contrast with the UK where Nick Clegg's announcement of the "Your Freedom" project, aiming to repeal laws seen as onerous or unnecessary came with a new website where people can suggest laws that they want repealed. Basically, a bonfire of the inanities.

And one of the first laws that got put up there by annoyed citizens as a candidate for repeal? The Digital Economy Act, passed in the "wash-up" period at the fag-end of the last Parliament, opposed then by the Liberal Democrats (in particular Don Foster) and the occasion for his first-ever revolt by Labour MP and former Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson.

Indeed, Clegg himself called during the election for the DEA to be repealed. Can't see his name in the comments. Yet.

The contrast between Finland and the UK could not be more stark. Where Finland is treating broadband as being essential to its infrastructure, the DEA offers the potential for strictures where people could, in theory, be cut off if they are judged to have broken copyright law. (The Labour government insisted that this would only happen in the most extreme of cases, and there is no mention in the Act of any "three strikes" methodology, but the threat still remains. It's just a question of process.)

Finland, of course, has good reason to want to make sure that all its citizens can get broadband. They're not solely about high-tech. It's also because Finland has some incredibly rural areas, as well as its cities. And it gets extremely cold in winter, which means that it's preferable to stay where you are than to travel long distances to work, if your work can be done via a computer.

Partly for that reason, Finland is already one of the world's most connected countries, with 96% of citizens online - but in October the communications minister, Suvi Linden, said that the mandate was necessary in order to improve the availability of internet in Finland's remote rural areas. In an announcement in September, Ms Linden committed to making 100Mb internet access - one hundred times faster than the connections mandated under the current law - available to all Finnish residents by 2015.

In the UK, the government is aiming at 2Mbps for 99% of the population by 2012 - but there's no law to back it. Jeremy Hunt, the secretary of state at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, declared early in June that he wants the UK to have the best superfast broadband network in Europe: "We are now ranked 33rd in the world when it comes to broadband speed, with an average that is nearly five times slower than South Korea", he said. "Within this parliament we want Britain to have the best superfast broadband network in Europe."

Unfortunately we're miles behind in that race, and without any legal force to make telecomms companies provide that sort of connectivity, and no clear subsidy to encourage them to connect the rural areas (which are most expensive to wire, and produce the lowest return, because you have few customers far apart, compared to cities where you have many customers close together) it looks like we're going to continue to lag.

Even so, we can be hopeful about the DEA. It would be interesting if the Lib Dem arm of the coalition manages to get the DEA repealed. As sheredom, who suggested it for the bonfire, pointed out, the reasons for killing it are:

"1. Misguided bill that will not combat the issues that it claims to. Puts unnecessary strain on ISPs that do not wish to enforce the law; 2. To stand up to these lobby groups and say 'No, we are not going to do things because big business tells us to.'"